Informative Animal Picture Books & Activity Books

Disclosure: I was sent a copy of these books in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Do you have an animal lover between the ages of 4 and 8? I have some fun books for you. There are three domesticated animal stories and four wild animal books. The first is actually a wordless book called Pip & Pup by Eugene Yelchin. 

ART -- Book Review & Giveaway

 

Disclosure: I was sent a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. I am working with Kate Foster and The Children's Book Review to bring you this post and giveaway.

Over the years I have shared several wordless books. Books without words or with only a few words help develop children's imaginations. It can make story time really interesting and a wordless book's story can change each time. We have shared some of our favorite ones as well as new ones we reviewed. when we were at the Waldorf School it was suggested not to read young children books with words until kindergarten. Today I get to share another one that is very unique. It is Art by Marin Darmonkow.

Fairy Tales in Different Cultures: A Cinderella Tale from Thailand

For this week's fairy tale in a different culture we are sharing a Cinderella tale from Thailand. We are exploring Thailand with Around the World in 12 Dishes this month and I happened across this Cinderella tale when I was looking at books from the library that came up with the key word Thailand. The book is Kao and the Golden Fish: A Folktale from Thailand As Remembered by Wilai Punpattanakul-Crouch retold by Cheryl Hamada and illustrated by Monica Liu. Now one thing I loved about this book are the beautiful pictures. The story is wordless, however at the end of the book the story is written in words. The first time through the book, we just looked at the pictures trying to figure out what was happening and then found the story. The second time through I was able to tell the story as we looked at the pictures. I was very happy to discover it was a Cinderella tale. Before we get into the tale, a little about Thailand.

Thailand is officially the Kingdom of Thailand and was formerly known as Siam. It is in Southeast Asia. It is a constitutional monarchy with King Rama IX reigning since 1946. He is the longest serving head of state and the longest reigning monarch in Thailand history. The capital city is Bangkok and it is the largest city in Thailand. 

Thailand is considered an emerging economy and a newly industrialize country. It offers free public education through age 17. Teaching is done mostly by rote memorization. Thailand exports rice, textiles and footwear, rubber, cars, computers and more. Thailand exports the most rice in the world. Rice is the most important crop there. (Source)

Now onto our story. Kao is a young Thai girl who lives happily with her parents until her mother dies. Her father remarries a woman who also has a daughter. The stepmother and stepsister make Kao do all the housework. One day after Kao's father has died while bathing in the pond a golden fish comes up to Kao and talks to her saying it is her mother. Kao spends more time bathing and comes back happy and her stepmother gets curious as to the cause. She sends her own daughter to spy on Kao the next day. She sees Kao talking to the fish. Then the stepmother has the stepsister go down and trick the fish and capture it. They cook it and eat it. Kao is so upset. She buries the fishbones and waters where she buries them in hope her mother will come back. Soon an eggplant plant grows there. Kao talks to the plant on her way back from bathing in the pond each day. Her stepmother is jealous of Kao's happiness and sends her daughter to dig up the plant. They eat and burn the plant, but Kao finds some seeds. She takes the seeds away from the house near the road and plants them there. When she can she goes and waters them. They grow into two beautiful trees. Kao hears her mother's voice when the wind blows them. Many people rest under the trees. One day a prince stops and rests there. He loves the noise of the wind blowing in them and orders his servants to dig them up and bring them back to his palace. The servants try and try and even use an elephant to try, but the trees will not be moved. The prince posts signs and asks the owner of the trees to come to his palace. Kao sees the sign and goes. The prince asks her to give him the trees. She tells him she will give him an answer the next day. She goes and asks the trees/mother what to do. They decide to make the prince happy. The mother asks Kao to bring the prince to the trees and she does. Then they get married and live happily with the trees in the courtyard of their palace. 

This story reminded me a bit of the Chinese version where the lead character befriends a fish and uses the fishbones for magic after the stepmother kills the fish. Again what I really loved about this book were the pictures and the wordless pictures. If you read this book, read the story ahead of time so you can tell the story with the pictures. It is a wonderful introduction to life in Thailand.

The Snowman and The Snowman and the Snow Dog & Naya's Arctic Adventures: Meet Naya -- DVD Reviews and Giveaway!!

Disclosure: NCircle Entertainment gave me a copy of the DVDs free of charge and is supplying the ones for the giveaway free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the DVD on NCircle Entertainment's site for your convenience. You can also find their DVDs at local retailers!

Today I am sharing with you two fun DVDs that are perfect for winter and Christmas. Both are really wordless!! The first is a combination of two favorite ones one of which we have reviewed in the past The Snowman and The Snowman and the Snowdog. They are based on the books of the same titles by Raymond Briggs. Now both stories are available on one DVD!! 

Books for the Imagination for Different Ages

Disclosure: I was sent these books to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.

Today I am going to share some fun books that bring out the imagination in the reader and require some imagination to really understand. There is even one about letting one's imagination go wild. These books are various ages and we will look at them from the youngest to the oldest. The first book is a wordless book by Alison Jay called Bee & Me. 

Picture Books Review

With the start of December and Advent, I thought I would share each post where our Mouse and the Miracle Mouse (Holy) has been up to. (He now has an elf friend named Elfie who often is hidden with him.)

Holy on Window with Angels and Elfie Hanging on Tree

Disclosure: Candlewick Press gave me a copy of this book free of charge to review. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

Today I am going to share with you five wonderful picture books that help grow imaginations and wonder. These books will help the reader learn about the world and use their imaginations. We had so much fun exploring this five books and highly recommend them. I also shared some round-ups of crafts to go with three of the books. First I am going to start with a wordless book.

Rainbows and Spring Hares/Bunnies

Disclosure: I was sent these books to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.  Some of the links are affiliate links where I will receive a small percentage of any purchases made through them at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting Crafty Moms Share!

Last week Punxsutawney Phil and Massachusetts official groundhog, Ms. G, saw their shadows so apparently there are six more weeks of winter and if today is any sign they will not be nice weeks of winter. We have snow with blizzard warnings and requests to stay off the roads. This makes me want to think about spring (and somehow this time of year always gets me thinking about spring no matter what the winter weather has been). Today I am going to share with you two new books perfect for thinking about early spring and nice weather. The first is My Color Is Rainbow by Agnes Hsu an Yuliya Gwilym.

Books that Inspire the Imagination -- Summertime Fun

Disclosure: I was sent these books free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the book for your convenience.

Summertime is for day dreaming and imaging. Don't you agree? I remember those summer days of making up games and just pretending with friends or myself. I always love giving Hazel time to do this and today I am sharing four books that help inspire that feeling. The first is The Bell in the Bridge by Ted Kooser and illustrated by Barry Root.

Christmas DVDs Review and Giveaway

Disclosure: NCircle Entertainment gave me a copy of the DVDs free of charge and is supplying the ones for the giveaway free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the DVD on NCircle Entertainment's site for your convenience. You can also find their DVDs at local retailers!

To help get us in the Christmas spirit, NCircle Entertainment sent us four Christmas DVDs to review and are supplying another set of four to one of my wonderful readers!! Hazel was really excited to see a few of her favorite shows represented. She insisted we start with the newly released Octonauts: The Very Vegimal Christmas.

Dorktales -- a Funny Podcast Series for Families

 

Disclosure: I was paid a nominal sum for sharing and reviewing these podcasts with you. All opinions are my own.

In our world today we have just about everything at our fingertips. We can give our kids our smart phones or tablets to entertain them. Kids today are glued to the television or some form of technology. When Hazel was young we started her at a Waldorf school. One of the things I loved about the Waldorf philosophy was the no technology rule. They actually took it even further for the younger kids. They encouraged storytelling without books or with wordless books. The philosophy believed that preschool kids' bodies were developing so fast at that time that the body should be allowed to do its growing without the burden of trying to work to learn letters and words. The art of storytelling seems to be gone especially during this pandemic. However storytelling is important for our kids' development. From stories kids learn virtues and good character especially from stories that demonstrate it. Kids will often copy the behavior they see or hear about. This is why we turn to fairy tales over and over. The basic tales have good overcoming evil over and over again. The honest, kind, good people are rewarded while the dishonest and cheaters are punished or lose. 

Sharing Saturday 16-29

Reminder: This link party is for child-oriented crafts and activities and parenting/teaching posts!! 

It is time for Sharing Saturday!! This is a link party to share all of your child-oriented crafts,crafts made for kids, activities and lessons as well as your parenting and/or teaching posts. On Sunday night we also host Crafty Weekends for all your crafts (done by any age), patterns, and craft product reviews! It is the perfect place to share your creative side!! And for all of your cultural posts come share them at the monthly Creative Kids Culture Blog Hop. 

Thank you to everyone who shared with us last week! I always love seeing what everyone has been up to and your creative ideas!! Our features are just a sampling of them so if you haven't checked them all out, you should! This week the features include Parenting, Summer, and Crafts.

Imagination--Readathon Week 4

Sharing Saturday is still open through Wednesday!! Please stop by to share your child-oriented crafts and activities and to check out all the inspiration others have shared!

Also Happy Family Times is open! Please stop by and share your fun family activities this week! Help us to inspire each other to have more quality family time!


As you know, we are participating in several book clubs, readathons, etc. this summer. The Memetales Readathon 2012 has imagination for its theme this week! I love this theme!! For the people signed up, there are three free electronic books to read with this theme. (Plus for every child who signs up a meal is donated to FoodforEducation.org!)

The first is Night Boy by Anne Laurel Carter. I love this story. Night is the younger brother and Day is the older sister. Night cannot wait to play hide-and-seek with his sister, but he has to wait until it is dark. He pulls out his blanket to make it dark and she goes and hides (to the west of course), but he jumps in his spaceship and heads in the wrong direction and gets distracted creating constellations and the night sky. Day calls him back and it is his bed time, so she tucks him in for the daytime. The perfect activity is to study the night sky of course. Although Hazel's bedtime is well before the sun sets during the summer here, we did some exploring of constellations. We talked about how people saw images in the stars and named the constellations using their imaginations. Then we created some of the constellations using flashlights and black paper or tin foil as suggested in the links below.

Creative Kids Culture Hop #29

Please Note: This is NOT Sharing Saturday. Sharing Saturday is still available, but this link party is for cultural posts only!

Welcome to the Creative Kids Culture Blog Hop! The Creative Kids Culture Blog Hop is a place where bloggers can share multicultural activities, crafts, recipes, and musings for our creative kids. We can't wait to see what you share this time! Created by Frances of Discovering the World through My Son's Eyes, the blog hop has now found a new home at Multicultural Kid Blogs.

Flamingo Friday--Flamingos' Coloring

Welcome to our second Flamingo Friday!! We have been enjoying learning more about flamingos and hope you are too! Today we are sharing a non-fiction book with you and something we learned from it.

We have been reading several flamingo books. We will share each one with you eventually. If you missed the first one which was the wordless Flora and the Flamingo, you can check it out here. Today we are going to share Wild Flamingos by Bruce McMillan.

Now before I begin with what we did with this book, I would like to point out the wonderful picture on the cover. I love it because you can see the black flying feathers of the flamingo. Did you know they had black feathers?

Source

This book focuses on flamingos on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. The species of flamingo are the Greater Flamingos which are the largest of the flamingos. Their average height is five to five and a half feet tall. Their average weight is eight pounds for the males (who are taller) and six and a half for the females. Their populations is estimated to be half of the number there was before Europeans first came to the Americas. Bonaire protects the flamingos and their breeding ground. There is concern about the development of their feeding area in Venezuela though. The book goes through the lives of a flamingo from birth until adulthood and returning to nest again.

Now many people know that flamingos get their color from the food they eat. They eat small shellfish and immature brine flies at both the free-swimming larvae and intermediate chrysalid stages. All of these animals eat aquatic plants and bacteria that contain the same chemicals that make carrots orange. So for a simple craft we decided to paint with carrots. We experimented with a few different methods. First we took a carrot and tried to use it as a paintbrush. I gave Hazel pictures to color that I printed out. The first one came from Lucy Learns.

This method worked all right, but was not great. Here is our end result:

Our other method involved grating the carrot and then placing the pieces on the picture and hammering them into the picture.

We put a piece of paper on the bottom and top. I think we actually flipped it so the picture was on top. Immediately afterward the picture looked like this:

This coloring page came from The Color. Then after it dried a bit, I picked off some of the carrot flakes and we got this:

We also bought a can of carrots to try to paint with, but we haven't had time yet. 

The other interesting thing I learned about flamingos is how they eat. The flamingos always eat with their heads upside down. Their top jaw is hinged and moves like our lower jaws. They filter-feed and are able to separate the food from water and mud. Their bills are lined with hair like teeth that filter the food. Sometimes you will see a flamingo move its feet and bill around before eating. This is to stir up the mud a bit and get the food in the water since it is easier to filter water than mud. 

So that is our lesson flamingos this Flamingo Friday!! I hope you enjoyed it!! And definitely check out Wild Flamingos by Bruce McMillan for more about the Greater Flamingos in Bonaire!

Telling Little Kids about Jesus with Fun Products

Disclosure: Let the Little Children Come sent me these products in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. 

Last month we shared we shared a fun Halloween tract to teach kids about Our Savior Jesus Christ and how amazing He is. Today I am sharing with you several fun products that can be used any time of the year. They are all somewhat similar but would work for different situations as well as for different ages. In all  of the products the colors have meanings. We will start with the Gospel Magic Bag.

Flamingo Friday

Today I am going to start a new series on flamingos. Now Hazel has loved flamingos from a young age. They were one of her favorite animals at the zoo from the first time we went there. Since she has shown an interest in them we tend to focus on them a bit. So each Friday we will share a book, movie, craft, activity about flamingos. I love this picture of Hazel at Sea World this June with one of the flamingos who was being taken back to his cage with a couple of his friends. You can see how big they actually are.

However today we are going to share a wonderful book we found at the library. It is wordless. The book is Flora and the Flamingo by Molly Idle.

Flora is a young girl who dresses in her pink bathing suit and swimming gear to try to act like the flamingo. She tries to copy the flamingos poses.

We went through and tried some of the poses too. However a bathing suit would have made it easier to see the poses. Sorry!

The flamingo keeps checking out what Flora is doing, but Flora pretends she is not copying the bird when it looks.

Hazel and Flora did well until the sleeping pose came. Then they both ended in a bit of a somersault. 

At this point the flamingo invites Flora to dance with it teaching her the poses. They dance as a couple for some of it. We did this, but could not get pictures. I did take this last picture of her though.

We truly enjoyed Flora and the Flamingo and trying to copy the movements in it. I hope you will check it out and have enjoyed our first flamingo post.

Readathon 2012 Week 1 -- Animal Themed Books

We are participating in MeMe Tales Readathon 2012. It is a six-week program where you can receive free electronic books for a week each week based on the theme of the week. This week is the first week and the theme is animal themed books. We were able to read The Five Little Ducklings, The Donkey and The Wolf and The Lion and The Mouse.

The Snowman and the Snowdog DVD Review & Giveaway

Disclosure: NCircle Entertainment gave me a copy of the DVD free of charge and is supplying the one for the giveaway free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation.

Today I have the pleasure of reviewing The Snowman and the Snowdog DVD. Thank you to NCircle Entertainment for giving me a copy to review. Now we have not read the book, The Snowman and the Snowdog, however we have read and love The Snowman by Raymond Briggs. The Snowman and the Snowdog is a sequel to The Snowman. Both books are wordless and so is the movie. We have watched The Snowman movie on YouTube. Both movies make the book come alive. They literally seem to be the pictures of the book moving. Raymond Briggs worked with the producers to make sure the movies were what he wanted from his books and you can tell. If you do not know the books, they are lovely stories of the magic of childhood and snow.

Snow Globe

Now Hazel has been asking for weeks about when it will snow again. For several weeks we had a white sheet down on the floor of our family room so she could pretend it had snowed. Needless to say she was very excited to watch this movie and we really enjoyed. She was also excited about the crafts we made to go with it. I found the crafts and printables at The Snowman Craft Activities.

The movie shows a young boy and his mother moving into a house with their dog. The dog dies around Halloween. Around Christmas time he discovers a loose floorboard in his room and discovers a box with the making for a snowman and a picture of the boy and snowman from the first story. It happens to be snowing, so he goes out side and makes a duplicate of the snowman. He runs inside to get a new tangerine since the old one is shriveled and sees his dog's leash. He makes a snowdog next to the snowman with socks for ears and spots and using the shriveled tangerine for his nose. Similar to the first story, the snowman comes to life at night and so does the snowdog. The boy discovers this and goes on a magical adventure with them flying in the sky. They find an airplane to fly around in as well and then go sledding with other snowmen. Then they come to a Christmas tree with Santa packing his sleigh. The boy helps Santa and he tells him his Christmas wish. Santa gives the boy a small gift. The sun is about to rise, so the boy and his snowfriends must get home. I am going to leave the end a surprise for you since it is such a happy ending.

The DVD does have a bonus feature. We looked at it briefly, but it was not going to hold Hazel's attention. It was about Raymond Briggs. 

The Snowman and the Snowdog Mobile

For crafts we made a snow globe. We decided to make a dry one with fake snow and glitter instead of the liquid. We also made a mobile using the printable at The Snowman website. We also made the garland. I printed out extra of the snowdogs from the snow globe and used them in the garland so it would not be just the snowman.  I hung the mobile from the garland and hung it in Hazel's room. She can pretend it snows every day in there now.

Garland

We also made some paper snowflakes using the patterns found at The Snowman website. We hung them from the garland as well.

Finally we made some marshmallow snowmen. Again the idea came from The Snowman website. After making the first one, Hazel decided to get creative. I pulled out toothpicks since we were having trouble keeping them together. We also used some mini chocolate chips on some. I had trouble getting black frosting at first and bought the chips in case I didn't find any.

Now it is your turn to try to win a copy of this loving DVD. You can follow the Rafflecopter for what to do and follow my Giveaway Rules. Or if you cannot wait, you can purchase it at Barnes and Noble or Amazon. (Note these are not affiliate links, but are here for your convenience.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Conductor--Book and Craft

Recently we got out of the library a book called The Conductor by Laetitia Dervenay. It is a wordless book that combines an orchestra conductor and a grove of trees and lots of magic. The conductor climbs to the top of the tree and begins to conduct. Soon the leaves begin to swirl and then take flight looking like birds. After the conductor finishes, bows and climbs down the leaves return to their place and the trees are no longer bare, but full again. It is a fun book. We made the leaf birds as we call them. Some of which looked like this but in black and white in the book.

I cut out the body of the bird from black paper (well I used black with gold sparkle) and some leaves from green and brown paper and gave them a slight fringe edge. Then gave Hazel a glue stick. She came up with this:

I cut out another and glued it myself. This time I made the leaves a bit smaller, so you could see more of the shapes we were using. The picture at the top of this post is mine.

This is where I link up...