Spinelli Favorites

I realize my posts lately have been focusing on a lot of adult books. My stack of books for the summer is enormous and I keep thinking I can get through some grown up stuff quickly, but there is just never enough time. I am still reading picture books at night to my daughters who are a good test audience.

Yesterday we checked out a book by Eileen Spinelli from the library. The Best Time of Day is a cute rhyming book about the best time of day for each person/animal in the book. This book was so cute that I can't wait to read it again tonight at bedtime. As a teacher I can see a lot of good ways to use this book, too - in a farm unit, in a rhyming unit (at various ages), as a writing prompt....I'm sure there are more. I pointed out to my daughters that Eileen Spinelli was the author and refreshed their memory about a book we just couldn't stop reading last summer that is also by Spinelli - Heatwave. My oldest daughter promptly got up to retrieve it and we enjoyed another reading of an old favorite. Heatwave shows the residents in a town - before there was air conditioning- living through a heatwave one summer. Each day throughout the week gets hotter and hotter. Finally as they drift off to sleep one night they have one thing they dream of - rain. We have had some very mild weather in the midwest - in fact it doesn't even really feel like summer yet, so we are definitely not in a heatwave. Still the girls loved hearing this great story and remembering some different hot days we have had last summer.

Both of these are great picture books - it seems that Spinelli has so many wonderful books out there to enjoy.