Flotsam

Photo courtesy Amazon.
Author/Illustrator: DAVID WIESNER
Recommended Age group: 2 and up. You are limited only by your imagination!
Caldecott Award: 2007

I have been reading children’s books for the past three years. The main things I consider while picking out a book are message and language development. For people like me, books like Flotsam are eye openers. This is a wordless picture book and I REALLY noticed the pictures, the effort the author has put in to the pictures in order to convey the message and was simply astounded. The medium Wiesner uses is watercolor. Every seashell is meticulously drawn. The use of lines and the play of light are so wonderful that one can almost feel its texture. The colors are pleasing to young children making the children focus on the story without overly stimulating them. The placement of pictures also plays a major role in story telling in this wordless storybook.

Wiesner’s message through his books - magical things are happening all around us, anything can happen anywhere, do not limit your imagination/dreams and never loose hope on your dreams becoming true(Digression: Check out Wiesner’s 1992 Caldecott Medal book TUESDAY. It talks about the dream of frogs coming true. Any one, even frogs can dream and you never know it might just come true! Keep dreaming, it keeps you alive!).

Flotsam is a story in which a boy finds an underwater camera in a beach, washed ashore by the waves. The boy is not able to find the owners of the camera and decides to develop the pictures from the film in the camera. When he looks at the developed pictures, a whole new world is thrown wide open to him. From now on it is a fantasy journey not only for the boy but also to the readers. The older readers who know about the functioning of a ‘real world’ stare open eyed at the mechanical fishes swimming along side the real ones, a family of octopus sitting on a couch reading a book, puffed up puffer fish acting like a hot air balloon, gigantic sea turtles with a whole city on their shell and star fishes of colossal size – that make grey whales look tiny, housing an entire island on them. That’s not where the surprise ends, one has to read the book to find out what the final surprise!

It was so surprising how different the adult mind works when compared to a child’s mind. I am trying to make some sense of the pictures, and this is exactly how my brain went:
A key wound mechanical fish?!
What do I say if the children ask me to explain this?
May be I can say that this is a marine experiment and the biologists are observing patterns about this school of fish.
Whaaaat? A family of octopus sitting on a couch and reading books?
Aahhha! I see a moving container capsized behind the octopus and the couch must have fallen out of the container. The octopus just happened to sit on it.
What now? Puffer fish flying??? Okay I give up. There is no way in hell I can explain this….

And guess what questions I had to answer? ‘What is the boy’s name?’, ‘Ammaaaa, hermit crab eyes popping out of his head? That’s so silly[they put their index fingers on their fore heads and start doing a hermit crab routine. They even came with a voice for the hermit crab]’, ‘The boy has two shovels, one blue and one red. Can I have two shovels?’, ‘Can we put fish on our couch?’. They just surrendered to the story line and digested everything! Gosh, why did I even worry about flying fish and floating aliens? Teh open mindedness, amazes me.

There was a lot of language involved. By the time we finished reading this book, the boy had a name, ‘Geeg’ (please don’t ask me why, I did not name him). When he looks through a ring, his eyes become bigger(Errr.. in the book the boy is looking at a crab through a magnifying glass and Wiesner has painted it from the perspective of some one observing the boy. So you can see normal right eye and part of left eye through the magnifying lens). He is playing on the beach and is not being responsible, always listen to your mommy and daddy Geeg (I thought I was looking at myself and listening to myself)…and so Flotsam from a 2 year old and a 3.5 year old’s perspective goes on…..

Ahaha, I am not revealing the final knot. Go get a copy of Flotsam and discover it yourself. Hey, you, you and you get off the couch and get the book. Next post surprise quiz on Flotsam.

Tops And Bottoms

Tops And Bottoms

Adapted And Illustrated By Janet Stevens

All Ages

During our recent library trip, my younger child went berserk pulling out all the books she could lay her hands on and thrusting it in to my face to read it for her. One of the books she pulled out was ‘Tops And Bottoms’ by Janet Stevens. The Caldecott Honor sticker on the cover really caught my attention and I borrowed this book from the library.

The rich, lazy bear has plenty of land and money, but he spends all his time sleeping on his front porch. The bear’s neighbor, hare has a huge family to tend to and an empty pocket. So the hare decides to over come its adversity through wit and deception. He strikes a partnership with the bear. The terms of the partnership being:

-the hare gets to work on the bear’s land

-the hare would do all the work

-and at the end of the season the bear would get half of the produce.

The lazy bear immediately agrees and chooses that he wants the top half and goes back to his precious slumber. He sleeps the whole time only to wake up after the harvesting and discovers that the clever hare had planted tubers – carrots, radish, beet root and such. The hare rounds up the goodies and the bear is left with nothing.

The second time the bear chooses the bottom half and goes back to sleep. This time the clever hare plants broccoli, lettuce and celery. Again the hare ends up with the vegetables and the bear gets zilch.

The stubborn bear simply refuses to learn his lesson. He declares that he wants the tops AND bottoms this time around, lets the hare do the work and sleeps through the season. He wakes up to find that the clever hare has planted corn. So all the bear gets is the corn husk! Finally the bear realizes the only way to get the spoils is by getting his hands dirty and decides to take care of his land. The hare, having a huge stock of vegetable, opens his own vegetable stand and takes care of his family.

It is a simple folk tale, packed with messages like ‘You snooze you loose’, ‘One can overcome adversity through wit’, ‘Anything that seems too good to be true is obviously too good to be true’. Plus I thought that it would be a cool way to introduce a bit of botany. My three year old now faithfully repeats things like ‘carrots grow under the ground’, ‘celery grows over the ground’, ‘the bear gets kuppai(meaning: stuff that is not worth anything) because he didn’t work’. But I think it is mostly rote, because, how much ever I explain that carrots grow under the ground, she is finding very hard to visualize it.

For some reason both my three year old and my almost two year old love this book. The only reason I can come up with - the illustrations. The older one bursts in to a full-blown laughter whenever she sees the lazy bear sprawled over the patio chair. The younger one gets a kick out of identifying ‘cawee’(carrot) and ‘baathalee’(broccoli).

Another thing that needs to be mentioned is the orientation of the book. The spine has to be held horizontal and as you finish a page it has to be flipped up. There is a full page illustration of a garden. The spine is the ground and it shows tubers at the lower half of the book, growing under the ground, and vegetable like celery and lettuce at the top half of the book, growing above the ground.

This is definitely a book that I will reintroduce to my three-year-old in a few months time.

The Relatives Came

The Relatives Came By Cynthia Rylant and Stephen Gammell.
All Ages

In the past three years, my parents have visited us twice, staying with us for six months each time. My mother-in-law visited us twice, staying with us for six months during the first visit and for one month in the second visit. My aunt has visited us twice, staying with us for one month during each of her visits. All the visits were well-intended visits by grand parents and grand aunts to spend quality time with the children. During all these visits, the kids had a royal blast. They run to the my grand aunt whenever their evil mother is behind them with a glass of milk. They love bathing with my mother, go for long walks with my father and sit and recite songs with my mother-in-law. They love to curl with my parents or mother-in-law on lazy afternoons and sleep for an extra half-an-hour. They love it that they have a fresh, tasty, healthy snack waiting for them after their siesta. When you are in a situation in which you care for a child that you have not given birth to, you tend to be relaxed! This relaxed attitude is not spelt out in definite words but yet the children catch it and tune in to it.

But when it is time to say good bye, it is hard for both the relative and the child. The adult grieves that by the next visit the children would have grown up a little bit. They can’t bear to think of the things they will miss – the first step, the first word, the softness of their skin, the way they smell etc. They are unsure if the children will remember them and if they will bond again when they meet the next time.

Well…for the children….it is even more difficult. They experience the same uncertainties, insecurities, turmoil, but the worst part, they don’t have words to express their emotions. For the next month or so, the younger one is surprised that I am the only person who answers her cries. She tries crying a tad more and louder hoping against hope that may be grand mom/dad are sleeping and her cry will wake them. She is confused why she is not lifted and being fussed over for every single call for attention. The elder one, as soon as she is back from school, expects the door to open and a smiling face to pop out. Her face brightens the minute she sees idlis on her plate, she cries out in joy, ‘Idli!!! S patti where are you?’, thinking that my mom had come back and has started making her famous idlis. The anger comes cold, raw, powerful and real when the respective grand parents have reached India and we talk to them over the phone. My elder child refuses to talk to the ‘deserters’ and the younger one starts wailing when she hears their voice. All this despite of all the adults preparing the children and for the imminent good bye!

But life goes on…. teaching invaluable lessons of, ‘Each in their place’, ‘What happened, happened for the good and what is happening is also for the good’, ‘Out of sight is not out of mind’, …..oh, I could go on and on…

This is the crux of the Caldecott honor book, The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant. I wish I could quote every line in the book or scan every single picture and upload it…every word and every picture struck a chord in me. I am exercising immense self control and quoting a few lines as and when appropriate!

In this book, it is the time of summer vacation and the relatives come to visit from Virginia. They close down their house in Virginia, load their suitcases in their station wagon and leave in the wee hours of the morning. They drive all day long and all night long, thinking about both their closed down house in Virginia and the relatives they are going to meet at the end of the drive. When the relatives finally arrive there is much rejoicing, there are hugs and hugs and hugs.

‘The relatives just passed us all around their car, pulling us against their wrinkled Virginia clothes, crying sometimes.
….
….
You’d have to go through at least four different hugs to get from the kitchen to the front room. Those relatives!’.

Then comes the sleeping time. The illustration shows a huge bunch of people scattered all over, some on beds, some on the floor, some squeezed with hands and legs over the person next to them…..for some reason, the image it brought to my mind was my grand mother’s old village house-summer vacation time-whole family clustered in the hall-sleeping on make shift beds. And the author rightly puts it in to the words,

‘It was different, going to sleep with all that new breathing in the house.’

When the vacation is over, the relatives load their station wagon and drive back to Virginia. After waving bye to the relatives, the family crawls back in to their beds, which now feels too big and too quite and goes back to sleep.

Whenever I read the book, I take poetic license and read to suit our context. One of the characters is picked to be grand mom or grand dad. I tell them that they can only visit us, but eventually they have to go back to ‘THEIR HOME’, so on and so forth. Message is being well received and the book has now been successfully renamed as ‘Thatha Patti book’. :)

Giraffes Can't Dance

Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae
Suggested read alone ages 4-7
Suggested read together ages 0-4

For a long time now I have been wanting to introduce self-esteem books to my older child. She is just three years old and I wasn’t sure how much she is aware of ‘self’ in order to grasp self-esteem.

Then couple of interesting things happened. One day she looked at me intently and declared, ‘Amma, I am brown. Appa is brown. My baby sister is brown. You are white. No Amma you are pink’. It took a while for me to realize that she was talking about skin color. Being one of the few desi kids in a white class room, she had some how picked up skin color and was applying her new found wisdom at home. The second incident was when we were laughing at something she did and we thought was ‘cute’. Oh boy…. she did not take it very well. She burst out, ‘No. Don’t laugh at me. Its not funny.’ I was convinced she knew about self.

Just as I was on the look out for a good book on self-esteem, this book fell in to my hands. One of the lead teachers at my school picked this book to read it for the four-year-olds in my classroom. After reading it to my class, I saw how much the children enjoyed the book and was sure it would be a hit at home turf. Even if the concept eludes my daughters, I knew that they would be sold because it involves African safari animals.

The story is set in Africa and it is the time of the African jungle dance. The lions are doing a tango, the chimps are busy in a cha-cha, the rhinos are doing a rock and roll and the baboons are doing a scottish reel. Now, our hero, Gerald is a tall lanky giraffe. As long it is standing still and munching shoots off the trees, he is okay. He can’t even run a decent distance without falling face down. When it comes to dancing, he knows that he has two left feet but he has no assumptions. All he wants is to have fun. But the minute Gerald turns up in the jungle dance, the other animals laugh at him, they call him names. Gerald simply freezes, all he can think of is his clumsiness. With head hanging low, he walks away from the dance floor. Poor Gerald feels so sad…and alone.

Ta-da enters a cricket. Now, the cricket is like the travelling bard, you see in Indian movies – he just happens be in the right place at the right time, all the time, offering chicken soup for the soul! The cricket teaches Gerald that when you are different you don’t stop dancing, but you just dance for a different music. Gerald closes his eyes, listens to the music in the air, the swaying of grass, the chirping of the insects, leaves rustling in the wind, the music in the breeze. His body sways inadvertently, his tail starts swishing, his hooves are shuffling, he is leaping and making somersaults….oh he is dancing the best dance of his life! By now all the jungle animals have gathered around Gerald and they all oooh and aawwh at the amazing dance and ask him how he learnt to dance so well. Gerald smiles and replies, ‘We all can dance when we find the music we love’.

I was amazed at the depth of the information packed in such simple phrases. Even without explaining my three year old tells, ‘Oh, oh, all the animals are making fun of Gerald, that’s not so nice.’ Every time I finish the book, I reiterate, ‘Do you just stop doing what you love, just because people make fun of you? NAAAH. When you do something with love and focus the same people who made fun of you will say good job’, driving the point home.

My kids have picked this book to read for our evening reading every day for the past one month. We have read this book to bits, literally! I am in the process of taping the torn pages before I am supposed to return it to the library! That tells a ton about how much the kids love this book….and also a little bit about how they need to learn to handle books gently The minute I get a reasonably priced copy of this book, it will be added to our home library.

The illustrations by Guy Parker-Rees is stunning. What are you all waiting for? Pick out this book from library/store and check it out for yourself.

Barnyard Dance

Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton
Suggested read alone ages 4-7
Suggested read together ages 0-4

Sandra Boynton, the author and the illustrator of this amusing book, portrays goofy-looking farm animals, square dancing with a lot of bowing and twirling. Throw in rhymes like,

Bounce with the bunny,
Strut with the duck
Spin with the chickens now
CLUCK CLUCK CLUCK!

Whats not to like in a book like this?!

This book is super hit at home turf and has been successfully holding its position as ‘one of the favorites’ for the past two years! Even the musically-challenged-me can make a decent song out of the catchy rhyming verses. Now I know the content by heart and when ever I start off ‘Stomp your feet, clap your hands, every body get ready for a barn yard dance….’ my children start bouncing with uncontainable glee!

Sandra Boynton brings out a mood of merriment with not just the rhymes but also with her illustrations. Plump hens dancing with eyes closed in total involvement, horses and donkeys slow dancing, the little chicks running around with confused expressions on their faces – all illustrated in simple cheerful line drawings.

Check out Sandra Boynton’s official website to get a flavor of her drawing style and her sense of humor.

Barnyard Dance is featured in Sandra Boynton’s music album The Rhinoceros Tap. Check out song #10 to get a flavor of the music and the rhyme.

Other:This book is the winner of the 1994 Gold Medal from the National Parenting Publications Award.

The Mixed Up Chameleon

Mixed Up Chameleon

by Eric Carle

Suggested read alone ages 4-7

Suggested read together ages 0-4

I get excited every time I pick up a book by Eric Carle. The reason being, there is always a message, not just for the kids but for the adult as well.

This book is about a chameleon that goes to the zoo. He looks at the animals around him and wants to be like the other animals. When he looks at a giraffe he is awed by the graceful, long neck. Does he stop with that? No, he pines for a long, sleek neck like the giraffe has and his wish comes true! At the end the chameleon acquires not only a long giraffe-like neck but a huge white body like the polar bear, a pair wings and long feet like the flamingo, fins and gills like the fish, shell like a turtle, antlers like the deer, huge trunk like the elephant, the wit of a fox and flippers like the seal. At the end of all these transformations the chameleon realizes that he is the happiest being just himself. The sad mixed up chameleon wishes to be his normal self and lucky for him, his wish comes true!

What excites my three year old is the simple, bright colors in the book. Also she now knows that a chameleon eats insects and changes color to blend with the background. When I ask her, ‘If the chameleon sits on a leaf what color will he be?’ ‘Green’ she pipes enthusiastically.

The message for older kids and adults is ‘Be yourself and be happy with it.’ I am trying to introduce this message for my three year old in a simple form. Every time the chameleon undergoes a transformation, I ask her to point out what is different with the chameleon. When she does, I ask her, ‘Is the chameleon happy now?’. For this she replies ‘Noooo.’ At the end of the book, I always point out to smiling, back to its original self chameleon and ask her, ‘Is the chameleon happy now?’ and she answers ‘Yyyeeess.’ Then we both chorus, ‘You get what you get and be happy with what you get.’

I Don’t Want To Go To Bed

I Don't Want To Go To Bed

by Julie Sykes

Illustration by Tim Warnes

Suggested age group: read alone ages 4-7, read together ages 0-4,

Every night it is the same routine in our house. When I announce ‘Bed Time!’, my announcement is met with an instantaneous ‘NO’ from my daughter. Even if it is late and she is tired from the day’s activities, she always has immense inertia to get in to bed, just like the little tiger in this book.

Having read ‘Wait For Me Little Tiger’, my children are already familiar with the Little Tiger series. This plus the title really got my attention and I decided to borrow this book from the library.

The story is about a little tiger (tiger cub) who refuses to go to bed. One night mama tiger, out of sheer frustration, allows the little tiger to ‘stay up ALL night’. The overjoyed with the prospect of playing with his friends all night, the little tiger runs away in to the forest to find his friends. His first visit is to the lion cub. The little tiger is disappointed to find the lion cub nestled between his dad’s paws getting ready for bed. Daddy lion asks the little tiger ‘Why are you still up?’. The little tiger replies, ‘I don’t want to go to bed’ and runs to his next friend. He visits the little hippo, the little elephant and the little monkey only to find that all his friends are getting ready to go to bed. The little tiger realizes that all of his friends go to bed when it gets dark and it is no fun to be by himself that late in the night. To add to this, the little tiger thinks he has gotten himself lost in the forest. At this moment a bush baby comes to his rescue and escorts the little tiger home…..just in time for bed. The tired little tiger falls asleep safely tucked between mommy’s paws.

Both my children like the little tiger series. The elder one, because she empathizes with the little tiger. Through out the book she points to the little tiger and says, ‘This is me amma, this is me.’ Then she points to the mommy tiger and says, ‘This is you amma.’ The literature is simple, repetitive and very easy for my three-year-old to follow. All mommy animals and daddy animals ask the little tiger the same question, ‘Why are you still up?’ and it is met with the same defiant ‘But I don’t want to go to bed’ answer from the little tiger. Even my younger child who is only 18 months and has no clue as to what is going on in the book, loves this book. She identifies all the animals with a happy squeal.

From the adult point of view, I found the illustrations by Tim Warnes to be highly appealing. All the baby animals are cute and cuddly to look at. The pictures and the concept were appealing enough to make me forget the fact that tigers and bush babies do not co-exist! Instead of nit picking, I convinced myself that the author is imagining a better world without boundaries!

Other: Author webpage: http://www.juliesykes.co.uk/littletiger.htm