Obama Featured in 60 Kids Books

Regardless of his popularity polls at the moment, Barack Obama is a more popular president with children’s book publishers than his predecessor.

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama has already made his way into dozens of children’s books - sixty to be exact. Continue reading »

Top Five Kids Books You (and Your Kids) Can’t Live Without

Sierra Black, 2009

Childhood, as it survives in my memory, was one long golden afternoon spent lost in the stacks of my local library. I’m blessed with kids of my own now, one of whom just discovered the magic of libraries for herself.

Between the library and our own large book collection, the kids don’t lack for reading material. Here’s my short list of books I’d want handy if I were trapped on a desert island with a preschooler. Continue reading »

Berenstain Bears Get the Red Carpet Treatment

We’re only mid-way through the long year of kids book-to-movie makeovers, and there’s already another biggie down the pike. The Berenstain Bears have reportedly been picked by Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy as his next pick for a kiddie flick.

Levy told USA Today he’d “like the film to be un-ironic about its family connections but have a wry comedic sensibility that isn’t oblivious to the fact that they’re bears.” Continue reading »

A Political Children’s Book With Universal Appeal

The political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has written his first children’s book about a penguin who gets a town to stop blindly following their mayor’s “very silly ideas.” Once Sparky the Penguin starts speaking out against the insanity of forcing all the town’s residents to, for instance, paint their houses green and purple, the whole town gradually admits that they were just going along with the mayor because they didn’t want to be laughed at. Continue reading »

You Can Choose the Cheerios Box Book

Forget the Wheaties box. The cool place to be if you’re a book author is inside a box of Cheerios.

And Simon and Schuster and General Mills want parents to help pick their next book in the Spoonfuls of Stories program. Continue reading »

Kid Books Lose Battle to DVD Spread

The books in many kid’s rooms seem to be losing the battle for shelf space with kid’s DVDS.

In a survey in England, a third of parents admitted the flicks outnumber the books for their kids. What do you want to bet the numbers aren’t that far off on this side of the pond? Continue reading »

Kangaroos and Dolphins and Crayfish, Oh My

I’m beginning to notice a theme in children’s lit: kids and critters go hand-in-hand. So we rounded up some of the newest examples of animal antics on bookshelves and let you know whether they’re worth the hardcover investment: Continue reading »

Former NPR Host Has New Parenting Blog

Any NPR geeks out there? Somehow, given the high intelligence and information hunger of our readers (not to mention your good looks and pleasant aroma), I think there are. So you might be pleasantly surprised to find out that Madeline Brand, former host of the canceled “Day to Day” show, now has joined the totally fun — and highly lucrative (cough) — world of parenting blogging (although actually, it might just be a financial step up from public radio). She’ll be writing and podcasting for the LA Times.

And based on the first post, it’s going to be a worthy read. She describes her objectives thusly: Continue reading »

Little Blue and Little Yellow Turn 50

It’s literally blobs of color scattered across pages, and yet Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow is still being taught in classrooms fifty years on.

It’s an introduction to color mixing - both literal and figurative. Continue reading »

What Makes a Kid’s Book Classic?

In light of today’s debut of the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie, the New York Times Artsbeat blog addresses the question of what defines a classic children’s book. Writer Dwight Garner cites Eden Ross Lipson, the late children’s books editor of the New York Times Book Review, who believed that it wasn’t critics’ reviews or adults’ embrace of the book, but whether children choose to read it to their own kids when they grow up.

That’s a nice idea, really. I remember very few of the picture books I read as a kid, but one bigger-kid book has become a favorite in our house Continue reading »