The Great Kapok Tree

The Great Kapok Tree, A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest, by Lynne Cherry, is very educational. It takes you right to the middle of the rain forest, the pictures are so detailed.

This book is about a man who comes to the forest to chop down a great Kapok tree. But after he takes a few whacks with his ax, he falls asleep. And all the animals, including a kid from a rain forest tribe, give him reasons why he should not cut down the tree. The reasons are good ones.

In first grade my class did a rain forest play based on this one book. Each of us was a different animal, and we added animals that weren't even in the book, like a harpy eagle (my character).

I would give this book an age rating of 3 and up as a read aloud. Hope you like it!

The Three Pigs (a non fairy tale book)

The Three Pigs, by David Wiesner, is very, very funny. It starts out as the fairy tale of the three little pigs, but it turns into a quest between fairy tales and books. The three pigs get blown out of their story into a place where there is nothing but pages of stories. First they make a paper airplane out of one of their own pages--showing the wolf knocking on the door. And there is a very funny page where you can only see the pigs' bums (bottoms). Then they visit Old Mother Goose's hey diddle diddle (where they turn hideously childlike) and the cat follows them out. Next they visit a dragon, guarding a rose of pure gold, and they help the dragon escape from a knight. At last they all, pigs, dragon and cat, go back to the pigs' story and write their own ending...

This book is for ages 3 and up.

Calvin and Hobbs

Calvin and Hobbes was a newspaper cartoon series in the 1980s by Bill Watterson. It was a big hit. It was made into books which are very very good and you can still get them today.

The adventures of Calvin, the boy, and Hobbes, his tiger, are very funny (many funny things happen, but there is no bathroom humor, which is a good thing). Once I played Calvinball with my friends at school--it's a game where you make up the rules as you go along. And I've played destruction games like Calvin's.

Some of the stories are for teenagers or adults, but kids can still read this.

The Arrival

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, is, like Polo (see below), has no words. But it doesn't need them. This book is very very very creative. The pictures are black and white, and there are lots of them because it is a graphic novel (c0mic book). It takes place starting in our world, but it's not quite our world. The fist thing that is strange are the dragon-like tails, sweeping across the city. There's a father, a mother, and a girl, and the father goes across an ocean to a weird and wonderful city. He finds his room, and gets an animal companion(see cover)--sort of like a head with a tail and legs. Eventually, the mother and the girl join him, while in the real world there are giant aliens sucking up the people. More strange things happen. At the end, the family stays in the strange city, and the girl finds a friend.

I recommend this book for ages 7 and up (my brother says he understands it even though he is five but my mother doesn't).

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Polo.

Polo by Régis Faller (2006) has no words (except sound effects), but it doesn't need them (it was written by a Frenchman). The pictures tell you what's happening. It's a great way to show how you can say things without using words. Polo is a dog who travels to imaginary places. All the places Polo visits have things that don't happen in real life, like an elevator built inside a tree, a boat made of ice, or an underground country of giant blue mushrooms. I recommend this book for ages 3 and up.

MAMMOTH ACADEMY!

Mammoth Academy, by Neil Layton, is a chapter book that I nominated for the Cybils in the Middle Grade Reader category because I liked it so much. It is about two mammoths, Oscar and Arabella, who go to a school called Mammoth Academy to learn all the sorts of things we people learn in our schools. There are creatures that aren't mammoths too, like a cave cat, an owl, and a fox. All of the creatures at the academy get along with mammoths. They have very cool adventures, especially Fox and Oscar, like going up a steep mountain and finding a human cave school (humans were very dumb at that time!).

I love the black and white illustrations, and there are lots of them!

This book is an easy reader, but it has too many pages to count in that category the Cybils! It has ten chapters and 149 pages (this is the UK version). This books is for ages 6 and up.

Here's another review, at Jen Robinson's Book Page.