It’s a rainy day, so I looked for Christian Robinson’s book Rain, but it was out. I went with my original lineup, including some books about bugs and eggs hatching. Maybe because of the weather, we had a slightly smaller group today, about 12-13 kids.
- Welcome, announcements (no storytime next Monday because of Patriots’ Day)
- “Hello Friends” song with ASL from Jbrary
- Name song (“____ is here today”)
- Interstellar Cinderella by Deborah Underwood, illustrated by Meg Hunt: This might’ve been too much of a reach for this group. The story is in rhyme, but it’s a little on the long side, or maybe there just isn’t the familiarity with the classic Cinderella tale yet, so it’s harder to enjoy variations. Some of the grown-ups liked it, though.
- Song cube: “Where Is Thumbkin?” “ABCs”
- We All Went On Safari by Laurie Krebs and Julia Cairns: Today we focused on the counting aspect of this book, but you could easily focus on animals instead.
- Yoga flow
- Bug puppets! We had a big basket of them in the closet, so I pulled them out and we looked at them one by one. One of them was even a caterpillar/butterfly, so the kids could see the transformation. We also had a ladybug, an ant, a spider, a fly, a monarch butterfly, a praying mantis, and a grasshopper. This was a perfect lead-in to…
- Some Bugs: words by Angela DiTerlizzi, bugs by Brendan Wenzel. I love this book for storytime or one-on-one: it rhymes and moves quickly, and the illustrations are bright and interesting.
- Song cube: “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” “Row Row Row Your Boat”
- Shake A Leg, Egg by Kurt Cyrus: One of my favorite springtime books, though maybe better one-on-one than in a group; the author/illustrator uses some really different perspectives, and there’s plenty of detail in the realistic illustrations. But I do love saying the first line (“Hello in there!”) like Miracle Max in The Princess Bride.
- Speaking of eggs…time for shaker eggs and “Shake Your Sillies Out”!
- Grumpy Pants by Claire Messer, with penguin puppet. Most of the kids came up to pet and hug the penguin, which helped its grumpy mood. There’s also counting (“One, two, three…SPLASH!”).
- Yoga flow
- There’s A Bear On My Chair by Ross Collins: Kids’ attention was starting to wander a little but the ending got a laugh from a couple grown-ups.
- “Goodbye Friends” song with ASL from Jbrary
- Clean up mats
- Handout for grown-ups: Great books to share with two- and three-year-olds
- Drawing with crayons on butcher paper on the floor
Next Monday we’re closed for Patriots’ Day, but I’m covering another Step Into Storytime this Friday and might debut a flannel cake and candles I just made to go with When’s My Birthday? Stay tuned!
Whitney Scharer was up first, showing slides and then reading from her debut novel about Lee Miller, known as a model for Vogue and surrealist Man Ray’s muse, though she was a photographer in her own right, and co-inventor of the technique of solarization. (Aside: Every student should have a project like the one mentioned in Meg Wolitzer and Holly Goldberg Sloan’s new middle grade novel, To Night Owl From Dogfish, “Give the right person the credit.”) Scharer discovered Miller at an exhibit featuring Man Ray at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2011, and was interested in the two of them “being in love and making art together.” (Miller went on to be a war reporter; she reminded me of Robert Capa’s partner, Gerda Taro, who was killed while documenting the Spanish Civil War.) Scharer read a scene from her novel in which Miller describes what she calls “wild mind”: her ability to set any expression on her face while modeling, yet thinking of anything she wants, setting her mind free. The scene (possibly the whole novel?) was in present tense.
Next, Jenna Blum (The Stormchasers, Those Who Save Us) talked about and read from her new novel, The Lost Family, set in New York and centered around a Holocaust survivor, Peter, who lost his wife and daughters. He now owns and runs a restaurant called Masha’s, after his late wife, and has sworn not to get involved with anyone again – but, of course, he does. The novel is about Peter and his second wife and their daughter, “a whole family trying to put its arms around a loved one’s PTSD.” Blum didn’t have slides, but she did share a cocktail of her own invention, and cream puffs called “Masha’s Little Clouds”; she said that she invented and kitchen-tested all the menu items in the book.
Finally, Christopher Castellani (A Kiss From Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, All This Talk of Love) talked about his newest novel, Leading Men, which imagines a party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino in 1975, the guests, and the aftermath. Castellani said that people always want to know “how much is true and how much is not true,” so he explained that the party did happen, and that Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlot really were invited, but that Williams’ journal does not mention the party in the days or weeks following it. Using both “real and invented people,” Castellani imagined and invented “between the cracks of what was known about these people.” Merlot is his main character; Williams isn’t a “point of view character” largely because he is too well-known, has written and been written about too much; Merlot, though not obscure, is less of a known quantity. Castellani admitted that it was daunting to write dialogue for characters like Capote and Williams; he would often use an “anchor quote” from their writings in order to get the tone of the dialogue and scene, and would sometimes remove the “scaffolding” once the scene was finished.
The past few months have also brought us graphic novel adaptations of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. The former is YA rather than middle grade, and the art is quite different from the books above; Emily Carroll did an absolutely haunting job translating Speak into a new format. Melissa’s silence, the claustrophobic atmosphere of menace, and the slow healing and emerging that takes place are rendered in a way that honors and enhances the original.
The Giver is often read in late grade school, though it’s one of those books that is thought-provoking no matter when in life you encounter it. Unlike the rest of the books here, it is set in a different reality than our own, a futuristic place of Sameness. P. Craig Russell produced the graphic novel version; cool blues and grays prevail, until Jonas’ moments of “seeing beyond” introduce flashes of color, and The Giver’s memories do the same. The Giver himself looks less Kindly and more ominous than I had pictured him, and the whole community has a 1950s vibe (on purpose). It’s very hard to improve on the original, and as one of the first utopia/dystopia novels that young readers encounter, it’s not in danger of falling by the wayside, but if this version of The Giver finds a new audience, all the better.
Jenny Arch 