wordless picture books

If your kids are tired of reading this summer, it might be time to change things up a little.  There are lots of wordless picture books with great stories.  Reading won't feel like a chore.  The reader tells the story instead of having to decode the words.  Books pictured above are The Girl and the Bicycle by Mark Pett, Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day, I Walk with Vanessa by Kerascoet, Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie dePaola, Rainstorm by Barbara Lehman, and The Secret Box by Barbara Lehman.  A few others that my students or I really like are Hank Finds an Egg by Rebecca Dudley, The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney, Rosie's Glasses by David Whamond and Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson.

The Crayon Man

The Crayon Man by Natascha Biebow and illustrated by Steven Salerno is a picture book to share with everyone.  It tells the story of how Crayola crayons came to be.  With crayons so common and inexpensive, I don't think much about them.  This new book is an engaging narrative to help others understand how the so popular crayons got their beginning.  It will help children see how a person's passion and determination can help bring a product to life for others.

summer journal

Something to do this summer with your family to extend your children's learning is to keep a summer journal.  This could be a joint project for all members of the family.  You can write every few days and have those with an artistic bent add pictures, or you could assign one person each day to jot down a few sentences about what happened that day.  It will be fun to look it over at the end of the summer and review the things that happened.

Last summer I did a blog post each week about summer learning activities.  I won't be posting with the same regularity, but I do plan to add a few posts throughout the summer.  If you are interested in looking back at the posts from last year, you can click on the tab that says summer learning at either the top or the bottom of the blog.  

east coast

I was in New England last week and here are a few of the things that I had the opportunity to see.I toured Mark Twain's house in Hartford, Connecticut.

I stopped in Springfield, Massachusetts to see these statues and a few more of Dr. Seuss characters.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts was interesting and worth stopping to visit.  If I lived closer, I would go back from time to time.  The exhibits change (one about Peter Sis opens this week) and there is a place where you can make your own art. 

The green mountains of Vermont are beautiful.

A covered bridge in New Hampshire.

One of the many old buildings on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The view from the Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island.

My favorite parts were the Mark Twain House, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the ocean in Rhode Island.