Saved By The Pie

I'd forgotten how great Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish is, until I read this to the kids the other night. They loved it. Adored it. Cracked up over it—especially the part about dressing the chicken.

We had some great discussions during and after reading, then had to read it again, and again. But I don't mind at all. Amelia Bedelia makes me smile.

Coincidentally, the night that we read this was the night that we took a lemon meringue pie to our friend Diane's house for dessert. Which Amelia Bedelia makes first thing on the first day of her new job. And, good thing for her too since she makes a great pie, but is very literal in everything else she does... wreaking all sorts of havoc all over the house!

So, I'm not sure if the kids connected with the story because of the humor or the pie, but they're sold! We've already stocked up on a bevy of additional Amelia Bedelia titles ("...goes camping," "... and the baby," etc.) Hmm... I've got a hankering for some lemon meringue pie.

Enchanting & Educational

Alphabeasties and other AmaZing Types by Sharon Werner and Sarah Forss is absolutely excellent! It's full of animals that are illustrated using many upper- and lower-case letters in different fonts for each letter of the alphabet. And, at the bottom of each page, there are examples of "fancy" or different ways of writing letters such as "... lower-case a can wear a little hood," and the D'Nealian lower-case k that "has kind of a knot"

My favorites are "C" (camel) and the "D" (wiener dog), and "O" (octopus, owl and ornament). The book had several fold-out pages, great color and rich language. If you have a preschooler learning their letters, get yourself a copy of this book—pronto!!

Happy, Happy Hearts!!

Michael Hall's My Heart Is Like A Zoo is a marvelous children's book. The poetic writing is smart and full of excellent vocabulary words like eager, hopeful, rugged, crafty and snappy. It's colorful, fresh, fun, silly, creative and we loved the "heart puzzles" that make up each animal. In fact, we ended up making a number of heart animals to give as Valentine's this year.

The frog, bee, bunny, hippo, clam, owl and crab were our kids favorites this year. Erik loved fitting each heart that we cut out onto a picture in the book and then planning the rest of each puzzle animal. Madeline loved helping with the construction too and especially loved the sea creatures.

This colorful book is surely a gem for your home library, and would make a great gift for any little somebody in your life!