(Part 2) Best products from r/childrensbooks

These are the books I've kept from my sizeable home library on the off chance I have grandchildren. They are in no particular order.

• Stranger in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy -- Animals inspect a snowman, eat his nose and mouth, and then kids in hiding who watched it all put more food on the snowman for the animals, having planned for the animals to dine all along.
  
  
• Frosty the Snowman -- Adapted from the song by Annie North Bedford. There are versions that use the artwork from the animated TV special, but I prefer this one with vintage illustrations by Corinne Malvern.
  
  
• The Night before Christmas by Clement Moore. It's in the public domain, so there are many versions. Choose the artwork you like.
  
  
• Santa Cows -- A modern family is hanging out at home eating pizza. They hear the sound of hooves on their roof, and they spend the night with a herd of cows in their home. It ends with the family playing baseball in the snow with the cows. The text is reminiscent of The Night Before Christmas.
  
  
• The Polar Express -- It's a charming, peaceful book. It's nothing like the movie. The film made my kids cry... terror scene, calm scene, terror scene, calm scene, repeat.
  
  
• Countdown to Christmas -- This is a must if you are a Bill Peet fan, a prolific children's picture book author from yesteryear.
  
  
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas
  
  
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer -- This is a reprint of the original from 1939 sold in Montgomery Ward stores. The author, Robert L. May, was an advertising copyrighter for Montgomery Ward.
  
  
• There are two Rudolph sequels. From Wikipedia: "May wrote two sequels to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The first is mostly in prose (except that Rudolph speaks in anapestic tetrameter), written in 1947 but only published posthumously as Rudolph's Second Christmas (1992), and subsequently with the title Rudolph to the Rescue (2006). The second sequel is entirely in anapaestic tetrameter like the original: Rudolph Shines Again (1954)."
  
  
• Olive the Other Reindeer -- This is a popular story about a dog who hears the song lyric "all of the other reindeer," decides he must be a reindeer, and heads to the North Pole.
  
  
• Santa has a Busy Night -- This is an unremarkable telling of the nuts and bolts of Santa Claus, but I wanted one book that told the basic myth in plainer detail than The Night Before Christmas. It mentions Santa travels to places where it's summer, and that kids don't get everything they want because he can't carry everything in his pack, but doesn't explain how he enters homes that have pipe chimneys or no chimney at all.
  
  
• Robot Santa -- This is a sequel to Santa's Twin, written by Dean Koontz, a horror fiction writer. I don't own the first book and didn't realize it was a sequel until now. It's for a kid age 5+, not scary, but maybe too developed a story for a young child. A much older child, or maybe just parents, might enjoy the Die Hard and Home Alone picture books.
  
  
• Night Tree -- A family's annual Christmas tradition is to walk into the forest and cut down a tree find the same live tree from last year and decorate it with food for the forest animals to eat. It's by prolific author Eve Bunting. I really enjoyed this story.
  
  
• Auntie Claus -- I can't vouch for this book as I have little memory of it, but my wife is upset to learn while I was compiling this list that I apparently culled it from our collection.
  
  For a Nutcracker book, visit a good bookstore. You'll want to find the right balance between the heft of the words and the style of artwork. Some Nutcracker books have gorgeous illustrations while others are cartoonish.
  
  A lot of my recommendations are only available for sale as used copies because my collection was built from attending garage sales and scouring thrift stores every week for more than a decade. You can use AbeBooks to search for books in used bookstores across America.

I don't suppose it was Life and Adventures of Five Kittens in the Attic - Gogo and his siblings by Fee Fee The ?

> In a cold rainy December night, five cute kittens were born in the attic of a house: Bezar, Lulu, Gogo, Chity Jr. and Jacko Jr. They lived happily and peacefully with their so loving and attentive mother Chity and their strong and very brave father Jacko. Until one day mother Chity and father Jacko left them all alone in the house attic. Days and nights they waited for their return hopelessly. So what would happen to five little kittens living on their own? An adventure story of fighting for survival, of love, of friendship and rivalry. The story of five very young kittens learning to grow up and taking responsibility for their survival.
>
>With rich and colorful as well as black and white illustrations. It is a lovely book to read for children and adult, and for all to treasure. It is not only touching, it teach children that challenges are given to help us learn and grow. This story is based on and inspired by true five living kittens that were born and grew up in the attic of a house.

You may want to try the resources listed on this blog post from the NYPL.

Always check out your local library for these recommendations first. These are mostly the books I liked enough to buy after reading.

Parenting books that I've liked best:

Adele Faber's "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk". This book has exercises to try and breaks things down by different ages so you can refer to it whether you're having trouble with toddlers or teenagers. I also have her companion book Siblings Without Rivalry.

Kim John Payne's Simplicity Parenting. This book emphasizes the importance of developing routines, helps emphasize that you DON'T need to get tons of toys or extra activities for your kids, and helps you organize your life even if your life is a little crazified by frequent job traveling or divorced parenting or stuff like that.

I... can't remember my other favorite book. Might've been a book for baby ages.

Now, for read-alouds. There are lots of nursery rhyme books, my personal favorite is Sylvia Long's Mother Goose, but my kids are really fond of Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells' Mother Goose. Either way, I recommend the ones that have only one nursery rhyme per page. The classic collections by Blanche Fisher Wright tend to have six or eight crammed on to each page and their illustrations don't hold my kids' attention as well. With one rhyme per page, as they get older they can remember what each page's rhyme is and can "read" it to themselves.

Alice Shertle's Little Blue Truck book is probably the #1 most favorite board book in the 1-2 year old range. Seriously. If you get only one read-aloud book, this is it. Other than that, hit up the board books at your library. I've found a ton that I like and a bunch that get recommended (like Sandra Boynton's books) that don't personally appeal to me. I love Leslie Patricelli's books, but I bet she drives other parents crazy to read.

The first book that comes to mind is:

"The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon"
Written by Jacqueline Davies, Illustrated by Melissa Sweet
Excellent story format autobiography of Audubon with beautiful illustrations. Great introduction to environmentalism as well.

Speaking of Audubon, any of the Audubon Society field guides are great to use with kids, even if they can't read the text. Ditto for the coffee table style books of his watercolors, such as "Audubon's Aviary: The Original Watercolors for The Birds of America" by Roberta Olson and The New York Historical Society. I worked at a summer camp that had a ahem fledgling bird watching program and the kids loved paging through the guides.

I'm a school librarian and all of our National Geographic Kids books, regardless of topic, are constantly checked out and on hold. They have a book about birding that looks pretty good. Birds of North America

For the little guys, I would recommend:

Charlie Harper's Count the Birds

Birds

If all else fails, you can use Angry Birds (in all its many current manifestations including the upcoming movie) as a gateway drug and angle in from there. :)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0060271396/ref=aw_d_detail?pd=1