Favorite Picture Books

About five years ago, a huge event in my personal life led to changes in my work.  I had children, and as a consiquence, moved from working full time at the library's main branch, to working part time at a smaller, community oriented library branch.  At work, when all the tallented storytellers I work with are unavailable, I have the real pleasure of conducting storytimes for visiting preschoolers.  At home I read with my own children - though sometimes, when they become fixated on one particular book, and demand it ten times in a single hour, this pleasure can become a little monotonous

 These are some of my favorites, among the many picture books for children I've read in the last five years:

Julia Donaldson's Toddle Waddle  describes a toddler's walk throught the park, past the beach and to the end of the pier.  The rythmic, repetitive and onomatopaic language is engaging, and is great to read aloud ,and Nick Sharratt's illustrations are bold and attractive, perfect to catch and keep a toddler's attention.  This was THE book that convinced my youngest daughter that books were good for more than just chewing

.

Rhythm and rhyme are important elements in Kathryn Apel's This is the Mud , another great book to read alloud to a very young group. A rather foolish, slightly mad looking cow gets stuck in the mud.  Attempting rescue, a stubbies clad farmer manages to bog his ute, and is joined by his strong jawed neighbour with his tractor and plow. The farmers daughter, her enthusisastic horse, a cool headed (female) farm worker and her bulldozer come to the rescue of all.  The book feels authentically (not jingoistically) Australian, the coloquial language completmented by Warren Crossett's illustrations of a recognisably Australian farm landscape and characters.

 What's in Baby's Morning? by Judy Hindley was the first book my eldest daughter refused to return to the library. It tells the simple story of a baby's morning activities: waking up and getting dressed, eating breakfast, playing in the garden, then listening to a story and taking a nap. The illustrations, by Jo Burroughes are  in soffly muted colours, and tiled, in a comic book style.  This allows for rich story telling, as plot elements , humour and rapidly changing emotions, difficult to convey with simple languge, are made clear to young readers.  The sequence that shows the baby realising a favorite toy is missing and breaking into "sobs and wails! roars and howls!" was one we returned to again and again.