The Learning Umbrella

When You Were Small by Sarah O’Leary and Julie Morstad tells what happened in the life of a boy “when you were small”.  It’s a pretty typical request from children, to tell about “when I was little” or “when I was young”, and this would be the tall tale answer to those questions.  The boy is shown shrunk down to the size of an ant, having silly adventures.  Hypatia giggled a lot when we read this.

Someday When My Cat Can Talk by Caroline Lazo and Krysten Brooker is another somewhat silly book.  In fact, silly books appeal to Hypatia, so we are reading a lot of them right now.  Cat owners/caretakers know that a cat can seem like it has a history to tell.  If only they could talk to us, and tell us about their amazing adventures before they came to live here!

Sally and the Purple Socks by Lisze Bechtold was another of Hypatia’s silly books.  Here, a duck orders a pair of new socks, mail order, and they are the best, softest, coolest purple socks.  With one problem - they keep growing!  She has them as a scarf, a blanket, a rug, and finally they block traffic.  Luckily, they are wool and they shrink in the rain.

Ancient Egyptian Jobs by John Malam is a dense non-fiction that I like because of its focus on how people lived their lives, and the entire spectrum of society, rather than on the royals and the tombs and all that “exciting” stuff.  Here, we learned about bakers, and farmers, and scribes.

Muti’s Necklace, the Oldest Story in the World by Louise Hawes and Rebecca Guay. This book states that it is based upon a very old set of stories written in ancient Egypt, hence the “oldest story in the world”.  The author has given it a bit of feminist twist, with the heroine stubbornly standing down both the pharoah and a magician, and then turning down the chance to marry the pharaoh in favor of returning to her beloved family.  We read it as part of our Egypt study, but Carbon wasn’t super interested in it.  I think it would appeal to kids who like fairy tales, and the illustration style is like the lush paintings so many good fairy tale books boast.

The Boy Who Was Raised by Librarians  is great for all the homeschooled kids out there who count the library as their second home.  And these librarians are as cool as the ones I know in real life - not like the silly librarian stereotype.

Planting the Trees of Kenya: the Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire Nivola.  Here is the story of the inspiring Nobel Prize winner, and her project to reforest and look at resource distribution.  The book could be a sequel to the Lorax, but it’s a true story, and it’s the true story of what can happen when someone cares and has a good idea.  I want to use this book later for Earth Scouts.