Pierre: A Cautionary Tale

Pierre: A Cautionary TaleBy Maurice Sendak1962

Written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, of Where the Wild Things Are fame, Pierre is about a naughty boy named Pierre who decides one morning that he is going to cry out his indifferences to the world by employing the mantra “I DON’T CARE!!!!”, that is, until a rather large and hungry lion sets him straight. Sounds a little brutal? That’s because it is!




“Now, as the night
began to fall
a hungry lion
paid a call.
He looked Pierre
right in the eye
and asked him
if he'd like to die.
Pierre said,
"I don't care!"




The Lion ACTUALLY eats Pierre………… who in the end, having been retrieved in one piece, really does care.

Published as part of The Nutshell Library (along with One was Johnny, Alligators All Around, and my ultimate favorite... Chicken Soup with Rice), Pierre certainly is a cautionary tale.

There is an animated version of Where the Wild Things Are which also includes the entire Nutshell Library set to music sung by Carole King allowing kids to sing and dance through the alphabet, good manners, numbers, and the months of the year. Peter Schickele narrates Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen both set to Jazz music. It is one of my childhood favorites and now I get to share it with The BOOG!

There’s Something There! By Mercer Mayer

There’s Something There! Three bedtime classics
Written and Illustrated by Mercer Mayer

Almost every child can provide an account of a nightmare, But Mercer Mayer's familiar books do more than just offer visual and written representations of such accounts. These stories ask children to question their relationships to the unexplainable. Issues of reality, ownership and control may be hard to explain to children but Mayer's stories ask us what kinds of things in the world are real, whether objects in our minds, such as nightmares or a menacing imagination, are real all within a child friendly format.
There's Something There! is a collection of three bedtime classics by Mercer Mayer including:, There's a Nightmare in My Closet (1968) There's an Alligator Under My Bed (1987) and There's Something in the Attic (1988).

As a child I was afraid of the dark and still to this day I am a little creeped out by things I have trouble explaining and perhaps by reading these books to The BOOG will she will learn how to take control of her mind's eye when it begins to work against her..... Although I have to say, she is pretty fearless already!

You can find the clip below in DVD format here.

Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree

Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree
1977
By: David KorrIllustrated by: Joe Mathieu

Cookie Monster and I go waaaaay back! He brings back fond memories of simple milk and cookie days promptly followed by a nap that we all looked forward to back in kindergarten. (By the way, what were the teachers thinking giving us cookies and then expecting us to lay still for up to 45 minutes?) Anyway, I was lucky enough to buy two copies of this title at the thrift store one eventful afternoon so I decided to sell one at my shop and keep one for myself and to tell you the truth, I would gladly buy a thousand more copies.

In this Sesame Street Little Golden Book, Cookie Monster finds a magical Cookie Tree in the forest. Think about it for a second: Your Cookie Monster, and you stumble across a Tree that is plentiful with cookies! This particular tree belongs to a witch and she knows that Cookie Monster will eat all her cookies so she casts a spell on the tree to only give cookies to people that will share them. Cookie Monster makes a mad dash to Sesame Street to find someone to share the cookie tree goodness only to be rebuffed by all his friends. Cookie Monster SHARING COOKIES? Yeah, right!

In the end he does find someone to share with…… and as always he gets carried away in a cookie frenzy.

The great thing about this book is the style in which it is illustrated. Most of the dialogue is presented in word bubbles so while you’re reading it there is a sub-dialogue depicted within the illustrations.

The BOOG was first introduced to Cookie Monster while watching Sesame Street but she fell in love with him after watching this clip of Cookie singing to the moon……

Learning through Pop Art

The BOOG is obsessed with Monet and Van Gogh for the moment so I seized the chance to turn her interest in art into a learning opportunity and I was amazed at how many books there are out there to choose from! My main focus, unintentionally, turned out to be Pop Art. I was looking for ABC’s 123’s and Colors and came across these very inspiring board books perfect for little hands and big imaginations.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and Wayne Thiebaud (1920- )were all key figures in the world of Pop Art and although not vintage classics, learning about letters, numbers and colors has never been so modish!

Roy Lichtenstein’s ABC
Copyright 1999
By Bob Adelman

Counting with Wayne Thiebaud
Copyright 2007
By Susan Goldman Rubin

Andy Warhol’s Colors
Copyright 2007
By Susan Goldman Rubin

Board books make perfect sense when you have children. At the very least they allow a child to get used to the idea of reading a book. They have sturdy coated cardboard pages that withstand throwing, food spills and the dreaded gnawing and chewing of little ones but sometimes a board book can offer so much more than reading training wheels and here are three examples of just that.