Favorites on the Shelf

Here are the ones we return to regularly:

Chair for My Mother
Something Special For Me
Music, Music, For Everyone
Cherries and Cherry Pits
- Vera B. Williams

Her stories are wonderful stories about Rosa and her mother and her friends. In the first story, their apartment burns down and after they move, they save for a new chair so that Rosa's mother has somewhere to rest after a long day at work. In the second story, they save again and then go shopping for a birthday present for Rosa. In the last book, Rosa learns to play the accordian she bought for her present, and starts a band with her friends.

Cherries and Cherry Pits was one of my daughter's first real story book and we've been reading it forever. It's about a girl who draws the people in her neighborhood, as she imagines them, and the world she imagines for the empty lot next to her house.

Princess Knight
- Cornelia Funke

Cornelia Funke has a list of titles that look interesting, but this is the only one we've read thus far. Nice twist on a fairy tale theme - mother dies, king raises daughter, tries to marry her off, daughter tricks them all.

Zen Shorts
Zen Ties
The Three Questions
- Jon J. Muth

We just discovered these books a few months ago, while looking for something to give to the preschool as a birthday present. The first is a series of zen parables told by a panda to three children living next door. I knew we had found something great when, as we read them for the first time, and I came to the end of a sort of tricky parable (about a grumpy young monk and a wise older monk who helps a lady cross a puddle), I started to explain the meaning of the parable, and my daughter stopped me short to explain it herself. These three books truly prove the buddhist approach to learning with a "child mind."