No theme today. The only thing these two books have in common is that we read them this week and enjoyed them. This first book by Claire Nivola is a short biography of Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer. Quite a famous oceanographer, although not someone I’d heard of before this book. Earle was a pioneer in ocean exploration and is now very involved in ocean conservation.
Nivola’s book is a very nice elementary age biography. It gives a good overview of Earle’s major accomplishments and also spends some time focusing on her childhood and how her early love for nature and habit of observing the world around her effected her career path later on. The text and the delicate folk-art style illustrations convey a sense of wonder at the beauty and sheer bigness of the ocean.
We are big Leslie Patricelli fans here. In fact, we’ve read her board books so often that David likes to “quiz” H. and I to see if we can recite them all from memory. We’re pretty good at it. So when I saw this book of hers on the new books shelf at the library I had to grab it.
A little girl gets a piggyback ride from her Daddy and cries “Faster, faster”. That’s the only text but we see on each page that the girl is riding a different animal that is successively faster (a rabbit, a horse, a cheetah, an ostrich, an eagle). Finally she ends on a sea turtle that exhaustedly crawls out on the beach, only to then turn into her (now very tired) Daddy again. Very fun and sweet. I’d recommend any of Patricelli’s books if you have a toddler or early preschooler in the house.
Related Links:
Leslie Patricelli’s website
Mission Blue: Sylvia Earle Alliance
Sylvia Earle’s TED talk
Stop by Hope is the Word for more Read Aloud Thursday.
Both of these books look wonderful. Faster, Faster looks like a lot of fun. Preschool aged children are sure to enjoy it. I enjoy biographies. I will check out Life is an Ocean.
Isn’t it funny how you end up memorizing some of these books without even trying. When my daughter (my oldest) was maybe one and a half or two she really liked the book “Bob and Larry’s ABCs”, and even though none of the boys have quite liked reading it as much as she did, I still find that even now I can recite the whole thing without looking!
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