More Fun Summer Reading

Now that we're closing in on the end of July, it's time for the young people in your life to read for fun (even though we know you've been encouraging that all summer long)!

In my work at the Bank Street College of Education two days a week as the director of the Center for Children's Literature, I get to work closely with the children's librarian, Allie Jane Bruce.

If you were to walk into the children's room today, you'd see an array of graphic novels on display that range from an exceptionally moving memoir of a childhood spent studying at the American School of Ballet under George Balanchine, To Dance by Siena Charson Siegel, illustrated by Mark Siegel; and Little White Duck, a memoir of growing up in Maoist China by Na Liu and Andrés Vera Martínez, illus. by Andrés Vera Martínez; to more classic comics such as George O'Connor's action-packed, gloriously illustrated Olympians series (my special favorites so far of the planned 12: Poseidon and Hera); plus a middle school Drama--literally--written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier about theatrical antics on and off the stage.

As with her graphic novels display, Allie's terrific summer reading lists include fiction and information books as well as poetry. The lists are divided into lower school (K-3rd grade), middle grades (4th-6th grade) and upper school (7th-8th grades). She also offers tips on how to present summer reading as fun, rather than a chore.

And here's the summer reading list I put together in May, just in case you missed it. Please don't miss Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein--my favorite summer read since my May list came out. Part Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (a wealthy gentleman searches for a young successor) and part Mysterious Benedict Society (testing wit and intelligence through unusual means), it's a great read-aloud for the entire family.

Happy reading!

Endurance

Sandra Boynton did what seems to be the impossible: She moved fluidly from greeting cards to board books for youngest children. The Going to Bed Book turns 30 this month, and it’s just as fresh and pleasingly surprising to toddlers today as it was when she first published it in 1982. Another of my favorites of hers, Moo, Baa, La La La! is like a song. Children come in on the title refrain and lose themselves to the music of the animal (and human) sounds.

This week I’ve been rereading Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown, well known for her book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. But she is perhaps little known for her innovative work with Lucy Sprague Mitchell at Bank Street, the progressive school that came to be known by its street address, at that time, in Greenwich Village. (The Bank Street College of Education is now located uptown on West 112th Street in New York City.) Together they founded the Writers' Lab where Mitchell, Brown and other writers began to share their observations of youngest children. They watched how youngsters began to play with and acquire language, more attracted to sound and rhythm than to actual words, which didn’t yet hold meaning for many of them.

We take their trailblazing efforts for granted now. Goodnight Moon is a nursery necessity. But at that time, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mitchell and Brown, along with Edith “Posey” Thacher, Esphyr Slobodkina (Caps for Sale) and Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, Maurice Sendak’s first picture book), were all influenced by the research they did with the nursery school students at Bank Street and the observations they shared in the Writers' Lab there. According to Marcus, it was Brown who realized that small children “did not place books in a special category of culturally exalted objects,” and therefore needed a more rugged format. William Scott, a parent at Bank Street who published many of the projects that resulted from its Writers' Lab, began printing books on durable cardboard stock “strong enough to withstand the onslaught of toddlers’ bites and tugs,” Marcus reports.

Because Boynton illustrates her own work, she smoothly moves between making a statement, such as “they hang their towels on the wall and find pajamas, big and small,” and creating images of a tall elephant hanging his towel high, and a lion placing his on a low hook, while dog busts out of bunny’s too-tight nightclothes and bunny gets lost in dog’s, to make the contrast and the joke. Margaret Wise Brown observed this is one of the contrasts toddlers enjoyed most—the playful juxtaposition of large and little, in a world where toddlers may be small in stature but stand at the center of their universe. Boynton gets all that and makes it look effortless, as the best authors of board books do. Her books are, in content and form, built to last.