Announcement: Changes for Story Time Secrets and Introducing my New Website!

The past three years since leaving the library have been a period of transition for me, and this past year, especially, I have felt much more overwhelmed by obligations than I have in the past. Writing books and raising kids requires a lot of time and attention, as does blogging, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. In order to restore some order to my increasingly chaotic life, I have decided to make some changes to how I blog. Here's what's happening:

1. Over the next few weeks, Story Time Secrets will return to its original roots as a story time and library-focused blog. With the exception of those published in 2016, the book reviews that originally appeared on this site have been removed. (More on where they went in a moment.) By the end of 2016, the only content on this blog will be directly related to library service to children, with a specific focus on story time. Though I won’t be posting daily anymore, I do plan to update several times a month with new content (book lists, story time starters, reflections on library service, etc.) and to continue on with my monthly round-ups of reviews of books for beginning readers.
2. I have started a new site for book reviews: Read-at-Home Mom. Posted there right now are some 350 of my favorite book reviews from Story Time Secrets (including most Old School Sunday posts, and all of the award winning titles), along with my Reading with Little Miss Muffet and Little Bo Peep posts, and a collection of various articles I have posted over the years. Read-at-Home Mom will be my new internet home, and I will be focusing primarily on older children’s books, award winners, and classics, as well as the picture books my girls are enjoying.  I also plan to post more personal articles related to parenting and homeschooling as time goes on. Unfortunately, I have decided to stop reviewing so many new releases and I will no longer be accepting review copies.
3. Finally, the reviews which were not moved to Read-at-Home Mom are currently sitting in a private blog waiting to be posted to Goodreads. It’s going to take a while to get them all moved, but eventually any review which is not available on the new site will appear on my Goodreads account.

I have new posts scheduled here at Story Time Secrets during the next few weeks, some of which are reviews of new releases. I will allow those to publish as scheduled and keep them up on the blog until the end of December. After that, some will go to the new blog, and the others will be copied over to Goodreads, and ultimately there will no longer be any book reviews housed here.

If you’d like to continue reading my book reviews, please click over to Read-at-HomeMom.com and subscribe! My first post is coming soon. Thanks for reading!

Review Round-Up: Books for Beginning Readers, August 2016

Easy Readers

A small,  but varied, selection of easy readers this month:

Guessing Geisel's guest contributors posted about Pug and Not Me.

Jean Little Library had three "Small Readers" reviews. Two were of nonfiction titles from Penguin Young Readers: Giraffes and Slow, Slow, Sloths, and the third was Duck, Duck, Porcupine.

Kids Book a Day reviewed Living In... Brazil.

Becky's Book Reviews reviewed The Thank You Book.

Mom Read It reviewed Benny and Penny Say Goodbye to a Friend.

Chapter Books

There were definitely some popular chapter books making the rounds this month!

The most popular was The Infamous Ratsos, which was reviewed by Books 4 Your Kids, Kids Book a Day, Librarian's Quest, Jean Little Library, and Charlotte's Library.

A close second was Piper Green and the Fairy Tree: The Sea Pony, with reviews from Jen Robinson's Book Page, Books 4 Your Kids, Ms. Yingling Reads, and Waking Brain Cells.

There were also two reviews each of Inspector Flytrap (Books 4 Your Kids and Kids Book a Day) and Mango & Bambang: The Not-a-Pig (Orange Marmalade and Becky's Book Reviews.)

Other chapter book reviews included:

• Commander in Cheese: The Big Move, Fantastic Frame: Danger Tiger Crossing, A Complicated Case at Redeemed Reader. 
• Daisy the Kitten, Weekends with Max and His Dad, The Cafe Mystery, and The Circus Mystery at Becky's Book Reviews.
• Owl Diaries: Eva and the New Owl and Emma is on the Air: Undercover at Ms. Yingling Reads.
• Where Are You Going Baby Lincoln? at Sal's Fiction Addiction.
• Posy the Puppy at Jean Little Library 

Reading with Little Miss Muffet & Little Bo Peep: August 2016

It doesn't seem possible that September should start this week, but in fact, today is the first day of school for the county, and the end of summer is not far behind. We are finishing out the summer not having completed a single public library summer reading program, but having read dozens and dozens of picture books, nursery rhymes, and poems. Today's post highlights some observations I've made of both girls as they interacted with books during the month of August. 

• Little Bo Peep has started having very specific preferences, not just for particular books, but for certain pages within those books. Her current favorites are the moment where the bear wakes up in Bear Snores On, the "brown" page in Little Owl's Colors, and the "yellow" page in the Alphaprints colors book, which shows a snake made from a Slinky. When she sees a page she likes, she leans over the book, almost as though she's going to climb in, and babbles at it very earnestly. If she is especially excited, she also slaps the pages repeatedly. 
• Because Little Bo Peep is so enamored of books, it has become virtually impossible to read aloud to Miss Muffet with her nearby, as she immediately wants to either hold, rip, or slam the book shut. Miss Muffet is horrified by this every time it happens, and can often be heard shouting, "She has a paper book! Don't let her rip the paper book!" I try to distract her with board books she can abuse, but I have found it is easier to read our more fragile books to Miss Muffet during Bo Peep's naptime and stick to board books when we all read together. It also sometimes helps to read to Miss Muffet on the couch, with Bo Peep safely in her Pack n Play, where she can hear and see, but not touch. 
• Little Miss Muffet has discovered her first real villain: Miss Viola Swamp, from Miss Nelson is Missing. She talks a lot about how mean Viola Swamp is, and how long her fingernails are, and whether she will ever show up at our house. ("Mama, Miss Swamp will never come here because you're going to teach me at home. Right?") She has not yet figured out the true identity of Miss Swamp despite multiple re-readings of the book, and a thorough discussion of the clues shown on the last page. I am not going to tell her, and I'm really looking forward to that future date when she finally realizes Miss Nelson's little secret. 
• Thanks to a brief window of time during which a decent recording of Reading Rainbow's production of Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain was available on YouTube, Miss Muffet has discovered that story as well. This has prompted many questions about grass, and why it dies without rain, as well as speculation over whether the cows in the story are dead as well. (I see what she means; they look a bit frightening in the illustrations.) We have the book out of the library right now, but I'm hoping to come across a used copy on one of our many bookstore visits.
• Finally, we received two new picture books for review this summer, which I'll briefly discuss: 
• 123 Dream by Kim Krans (September 27th 2016; Random House Books for Young Readers; ISBN 0553539345) is a counting book with a bit of an I Spy twist. Each page shows a number and an accompanying illustration showing one owl, two turtles, three thistles, etc. At the end of the book, there is a list of further items to be hunted down in its pages. The illustrations are beautiful to look at, but still this book didn't really make a strong impression on me or Miss Muffet.  I think we have just seen so many counting books that it's hard for a new one to feel special. I do like that it goes up to 20, however, as Miss Muffet hits thirteen and then gets stuck on repeat ("twelve, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen") but I'm not sure we're going to add it to our permanent home library. 
• Hey, Coach! by Linda Ashman and Kim Smith (August 9th 2016; Sterling Children's Books; ISBN 1454916079) is a rhyming story showing the highs and lows of a beginning soccer team's season. The lines of Ashman's text are written in different voices of players on the team, and Smith's illustrations faithfully bring out the personalities of these unnamed kids. Each two-page spread shows a score board in the upper corner which tells which game of the season was played, and what the score was, and the text and illustration tell the story of an important moment from the game. To my knowledge, there are no picture books that cover soccer in quite this way, so it is appealing for that reason alone, but even Miss Muffet who knew nothing about soccer found it highly interesting and asked many, many follow-up questions when the story was done. 

#BoutofBooks 17 - Day Seven

Today was the last day of Bout of Books, and I only read one more title: Marian-Martha by Lucile F. Fargo. This brings my grand total for the entire week to 23. I'm pretty happy with that, even if it's not as many as I originally planned. I will definitely be back for Bout of Books 18 in January!