How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird

Take one french poem
Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau
written by Jacques Prevert in 1949

Translate it
Illustrate it

and voila....

a beautiful beautiful book

translated and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein

The book begins with the first step a young artist must take:
first paint a cage with an open door

It then follows a surprisingly beautiful series of steps to painting a colorful singing bird.

We gobbled up these amazing illustrations
Izie loved the part where you must erase the cage, one bar at a time, being careful of the bird's feathers. He chose to draw the colorful bird on it's branch in the mid-day sun.
JT loved how it might be necessary to wait years if necessary for the bird to land in your cage. He was inspired to draw an eagle.

A perfect book for a bird-filled spring day.

How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird by Jacques Prevert

Tough Cookie

They call me a tough cookie. I guess I am. Come from a good family. Regular batch. Lots of dough. Lived the high life. Top of the jar. They're all gone now. I hit bottom and stayed there. It was rough. Still is. But you get used to it. I'm a tough cookie.

Tough Cookie by David Wisniewski is a classic crime drama set in a cookie jar. Lot of cookie play-on-words. This book gets better and better each time we read it.

One thing we love is the map of the cookie jar (the home of these cookies and the scene of the crime). Areas include the exclusive neighborhood of upjar (home of just-baked and best quality store bought cookies), Crocker Observatory (watches lid activity), and downjar (most shops, services and schools).

Izie drew the processing net that catches the cookies when they first drop into the jar.
The criminal (fingers) is pictures sneaking into the jar to get a cookie.

JT and Izie loved the fight scene (go figure). Fingers tries to grab a cookie but the crumbs attack him and try as he might, he can't get a cookie, he just comes up with crumbs. Crumbs that he doesn't want.

JT drew fingers trying to grab our hero, Tough Cookie



Mom's favorite part: I'm knocking back a cup of java when this classy blond rolls up. Store bought. Easy on the eyes.

And of course, baby sister found this book irresistable to chew on. We had to keep it far from her sticky fingers.

This book is immensely fun to read aloud.

Tough Cookie words and pictures by David Wisniewski

Akimbo and the Snakes

Suspense!
Snakes!
Alexander McCall Smith!

We loved Akimbo and the Snakes.
The boys want you to know that you will be holding your breath in anticipation.
You will learn more than you wanted to know about snakes.
You will be impressed by Akimbo's courage.

Izie drew a picture of the dreaded green mamba

Read more about Akimbo in the four other Akimbo books. We surely plan to.

The Baseball Chronicle

Sometimes you just need a giant book about baseball.
As always, we have been reading and drawing a ton, we just haven't been drawing too much about the books we've been reading.
Baseball fever has struck.
So when I asked JT what book he wanted to review this week, he picked the 695 page Baseball Chronicle his grandmama just gave him.

Hours and hours of re-reading fun.
Non-fiction heaven for an 8 year old baseball player.

The picture he chose to draw is one of Ken Griffey Jr.
If you have a ball player in your house, well.... this is the book for you

The Unexpectedly Bad Hair of Barcelona Smith

Barcelona Smith is properly prudent. He is such a careful person that he won't play with animals (for fear of catching diseases), he won't play in a park (for fear of injury), he won't smell roses (for fear of getting poked), and he never smiles (for fear of a bug getting caught in his teeth).

But one day..... his hair decides to take charge. His hair takes him to pet animals, his hair plays on the monkey bars, his hair smells the roses, and his hair makes him out of control.

He allows himself to smile and learns that the risk in doing things just might be worth it.

We loved the pictures and the story.

Here are some pictures of Barcelona's crazy hair. The boys used oil pastels and then rubbed over the drawings with a paper towel. It is unexpectedly fun to create crazy blue-haired men and then rub away at the pictures. You should give it a try.

JT likes the part when Barcelona's hair goes crazy and rides a bicycle.
Izie likes the part when his hair walks him out the door.

The Unexpectedly Bad Hair of Barcelona Smith by Keith Graves

Daddy Could I Have an Elephant?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you had an elephant for a pet?
How would you feed him?
Where would you keep him?

In Jake Wolf's picture book, a little boy desperately wants a pet. He asks his dad for a variety of different animals (a sheep, a gorilla, a python) and envisions how fun they'd be. He tries his best to talk his dad into it... only to learn how hard each one would be to keep as a pet.

JT decided that he'd like to have a team of apes as pets at our house. They'd come in handy catching all the fly balls that go into our fir trees, but they would also tear down the trees.

Izie really wants a bird, so this book hit home with him. He decided that the bird would be fun, but he'd eat all the tuna.

The Big Orange Splot

All the houses look the same in Mr. Plumbean's neighborhood, until a seagull flying by drops a can of orange paint on Mr. Plumbean's house.

The neighbors don't like that his house looks different and ask Mr. Plumbean to paint it.

He does, just not like they think.
"My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams."

Everyone in the neighborhood starts to create the house of his or her dreams. Individuality is honored and the houses are a blast.

We've created our own houses of our dreams.

Of course, baby girl's house of her dreams would consist of having everything at floor level, easy to chew on.

Izie drew a house that resembles a sick monster. You have to swim on the red river to get in.
He was also inspired by the flying seagull to draw his own bird flying overhead clutching food instead of a paint can.

JT drew a baseball mansion. Jackson likes this book because first all the houses were the same and because of a seagull, all the houses changed.

The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater