Last Saturday I had a crochet lesson at Wooly Monmouth in Red Bank, NJ. I started a new scarf during the lesson to practice my newfound crochet knowledge, but before I could really dive into yet another scarf I had some unfinished business at home.
Archive: April 17, 2008
2008 Medal Winner
I actually tried to read this last August and only got about 50 pages in before putting it aside for other books. I thought the illustrations were amazing, but I guess I just wasn’t in the right mood. Something about reading a rainy Paris story in the middle of scorching August in New Jersey wasn’t working for me. But when I picked up The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick in the midst of our recent April showers, I actually couldn’t put it down. Young Hugo Cabret, orphaned and living in a Paris train station where he fixes the clocks, gets into a series of adventures after discovering a mechanical man. I was surprised by how affecting I found the illustrated chase scenes. The black and white drawings are perfectly moody and atmospheric. It’s incredibly cinematic. Great, great, great.
Last week I had some classroom visits at a private Jewish school in the town where I work. They requested some Passover stories, so I scoured through our county system’s titles and eventually found a few for read-alouds. I was disappointed to find a shortage of exciting titles for the K-3 set. I’m by no means an expert on books for Jewish holidays, so there may be great titles out there that I just didn’t find in my library system. Some of the books would work for older kids, but they weren’t that well suited for story time. Too long, kind of dull, or very serious content matter like death and the Holocaust. There were some gems, though. In the end, I only read two of the Passover books I brought with me due to timing issues (I filled in short gaps with silly poems from Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky).