MommaReads

Mrs. Bear sets her alarm clock so she doesn’t sleep through Valentine’s Day again this year. She digs up the honeypot buried in the snow, sets out a bowl of crunchy dried beetles (Mr. Bear’s favorite) and gets out the Valentine cards she made in the summer. The hardest part is waking up Mr. Bear from his winter slumber. It turns out that Mr. Bear had been preparing for Valentine’s day, too. After sharing a special day together they settle into their den for the rest of the winter.

A sweet, sweet story told in rhyme of a little boy telling his little brother, his mom, his grandma, his cat, and his dog all of things he will do for them if they will be his valentine all while making each of them their own personalized Valentine’s Day cards.

Such a fun way to discuss the importance of brushing with your little ones. Lions, bears and penguins don’t brush their teeth, but mommies, daddies and kids do.

The classic tale of a boy who loses his mitten while gathering wood in the forest. Several animals, including a mouse, a frog, an owl, a rabbit, a fox, a wolf, a wild boar and a bear all squeeze into the mitten to keep warm. It’s only when a cricket tries to climb in that the mitten rips in two. The boy does finally find his mitten, but luckily his grandmother makes him another pair.

There are many versions of this story and they all contain a mitten and a bunch of animals trying to get into the mitten to get out of the cold snow. This version is a little different than the uber-popular Jan Brett version in that the grandmother in this story is more than happy to make her grandson a new mitten and the grandmother in this version also doesn’t make the mitten the same color as the snow. It would be fun to read several versions with your child and see how the stories and the illustrations compare and contrast. Being able to make connections between books is a great reading skill for children to have.

A collection of Arctic animals….10 caribou crunching, 9 muskoxen munching, 8 ravens raving…you get the idea. The clever twist on this book is that on the first page with the caribou it’s not snowing at all, but as the countdown continues, it starts snowing more and more. By the time you get to 1 moose, silent in the falling snow, it’s practically a blizzard. This would be a great book for practicing counting backwards and also talking to your children about how animals use camouflage….it’s awfully hard to see 2 snowy owls swooping when there’s snow all over the place.

Okay, this book about made me cry. It is SO sweet and is such a good example of doing for others and not asking for recognition. LOVE it! Sarah, an elderly widow, notices a boy dressed in blue at the bus stop who has no mittens. She knits him a pair of blue mittens and hangs them on the tree by the bus stop. He finds them and is then able to throw snowballs with the other kids. Then Sarah notices a little girl who has mittens that don’t match, so she goes home and knits a pair of mittens for her and hangs them on the tree. She knits and knits and knits and soon has enough to fill up the tree with mittens for all the children, but her knitting basket is empty. Somehow though, someone figures out she is the one knitting the mittens and leaves a surprise for her on her front doorstep. Super sweet!

This is one of my favorite Jan Brett stories. Nicki’s grandma makes him some mittens and he promptly loses one of them in the snow. A mole finds it though and thinks it’s nice and warm and just his size, so he scoots on in to make it his home. Then a snowshoe rabbit moves in with the mole and then a hedgehog and the list goes on and on until the mitten is definitely stretched to the max with animals trying to keep warm. A bear sneezing is what eventually gets all of the animals out, Nicki finds his mitten and heads home. His grandma is pleased that he has not lost his mittens, but is a little puzzled as to why one of them is much larger than the other. Brett’s illustrations on the side let children see which animal is coming up next…so much fun!

In this version of the classic Gingerbread Man story, the Gingerbread Baby escapes from the oven and by the end of the book it seems as if the whole town is chasing him. What readers get to see with Jan Brett’s extra illustrations on the side is that Matti (the boy who made the Gingerbread Baby) is devising a plan to catch him. By the end of the story the Gingerbread Baby has been caught, but only Matti knows where he is…safe inside the gingerbread house Matti was making while everyone else was chasing him.

A family decides to go sledding on the best sledding hill in the “whole wide world”. They all pile on, go zipping down the hill and hit a big bump which send them sailing into the air…WAY up in the air. They land with a thud and the littlest member of the family declares, “Again!”