I’ve been a Bernard Waber fan since I was a child. I have distinct memories of reading Ira Sleeps Over, and Lyle the Crocodile still makes me laugh. Somehow, I missed his Courage until just a few years ago, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a delightful addition to our July Family Focus Traits booklist, “Books Featuring Courageous Role Models.” Read on to see what makes Waber’s Courage one worth reading!
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Are your children scared of thunder or fascinated by it? In our house, the answer is a very strong “Yes!” to both! We live in an area of the country that gets little rain and even fewer storms, so thunder is a real novelty for our girls, something they only experience when we visit family in the summers. As a result, afternoon thunderstorms are something they really look forward to, but nighttime thunderstorms can scare them.
Enter Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. Thunder Cake both feeds their fascination with storms, helps them overcome their worries about thunder, AND is all about cake! Read on to see what makes Thunder Cake delightful enough to have been on repeat in our house all summer.
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Do you have daughters or granddaughters? Do you teach girls, coach girls, or babysit girls? Do you mentor girls at church or babysit for girls down the street? If you can even come close to answering yes to any of these questions, then please check out A Girl Like You by Frank and Carla Murphy, illustrated by Kayla Harren!
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About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post rounding up our favorite books to read to help children overcome fear and anxiety. Then, when my husband and I drafted out our year of Family Focus Traits, we knew that we wanted to include courage (by the way, courage is our July Family Focus Trait!), and in my head I thought, “Ooh, I’ve already got a great list written for that trait!” But, the more I thought about it, I knew this list needed to be slightly different. While my list of books to help overcome fear and anxiety focused on specific fears with explicit strategies to help overcome that fear (which often took courage, for sure!), our list of books featuring fiercely courageous role models shows characters demonstrating courage in other situations, too. Yes, there is some overlap between the two lists, but the books you’ll find on the list below tend to focus more strongly on the courage rather than on the fear or worry itself. So, read on to see which books we love for featuring fabulously courageous role models!
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Drum roll please… Our family character trait(s) for February are… compassion and empathy! (You can read more about our 12 character traits for 2020 here and here.) With Valentine’s Day in February, we wanted to focus our month on love and kindness, but in terms of having family conversations about our behaviors, those are both very broad, general terms. The more we thought about how we wanted to help our girls grow, we realized we wanted to help them SEE others more. To see other people and notice how they might be feeling. To put themselves in others’ shoes and act on what they observe. So, while we also obviously hope our children are kind in every way and show love to important people in their lives, we really want them to start to notice. To pay attention to others. To stop and help if it seems that they can, or to make amends for their own choices if they need to do so…
In other words, to approach the world around them with compassion and empathy!
As Jamie C. Martin wrote in Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids One Book at at Time, “Books help your family grasp on a new level that what we have in common with our worldwide neighbors far outweighs what separates us… It naturally develops compassion… because we all have similar needs, hopes, and desires. Great stories build an empathic foundation that leads to a life of service and concern for others” (p. 26). To that end, we love to use children’s literature to help our children develop fully as people. So, of course, we’ll be reading a lot of books showcasing compassion and empathy in February! Below, I’ve got 50+ amazing books for you to read with your children. Check it out, read along with us, and let me know if I’ve missed any amazing stories that our girls need to know and love!
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What if you woke up one day and the pencil you’d always used to tell your stories had disappeared? That by itself is likely an easy problem to solve, as you’d have other ways to express yourself. But what if all of your creative outlets had disappeared? Would that stop you from creating? What If by Samantha Berger, illustrated by Mike Curato, addresses just this conundrum.
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Up today, I’m sharing one of my all-time favorite books about creativity — and the beauty of this one is that it also encompasses so many more important life lessons that you can read this multiple times and have completely different conversations with your children each time. Read on to see why we love The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater.
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Are your kids in major need of escape from your apartment or house right now? If so, Lift by Minh Lê, illustrated by Dan Santat (the same duo who brought us Drawn Together), might be the perfect inspiration for some much-needed imaginative adventures! Read on to see why we love this picture book (that is also a perfect bridge into reading graphic novels) that perfectly captures the ups and downs of sibling relationships AND will motivate children to transform their days with a simple push of a button.
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As I hope you saw a few weeks ago when I published the booklist, our Family Focus Trait for June is creativity! We officially wrapped up honesty and kicked off creativity on June 1 with a yummy family dinner and family meeting (because, by now, you all know that in our house, family meetings are much more successful when everyone’s tummies are satisfied and their hearts are happy!). For our creativity kickoff, I chose to read Windblown by Édouard Manceau, which led into a corresponding process art activity that we all thoroughly enjoyed. Read on to hear about the book and get some information about the process art!
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Don’t you worry, we’re still reading all the best honesty books over here for our Family Focus trait of honesty for May! Though we don’t really have formal trait-building activities to go with honesty month as we have in the past, we are still reading our honesty picture books and adding to our honesty chart. And this week, we read an absolute gem — The Honest-to-Goodness Truth by Patricia McKissack, illustrated by Giselle Potter.
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