Saturday, November 17, 2012

1000 Books Before Kindergarten: Week Twenty-Five

Twenty-Five Weeks! Can you believe it? It doesn't feel like it's been that long!

Here's a run-down of our Books of the Week:

Week 1: Hugless Douglas, by David Melling
Week 2: Detective Blue, by Steven Metzger
Week 3: Dinosaur vs. the Potty, by Bob Shea
Week 4: The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
Week 5: Our Canadian Flag, by Maxine Trottier and Brian Deines
Week 6: Dinotrux, by Chris Gall
Week 7: Zoom! by Robert Munsch
Week 8: Farmyard Beat, by Lindsay Craig
Week 9: Baby Loves Summer, by Karen Katz
Week 10: It's All About ME! by Nancy Cote
Week 11: Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen
Week 12: Jazz Baby, by Lisa Wheeler
Week 13: The Castle, by Claude Millet
Week 14: Z is for Moose, by Kelly Bingham
Week 15: The Cow Loves Cookies, by Karma Wilson
Week 16: This Little Piggy's Book of Manners, by Kathryn Madeline Allen
Week 17: Baby Beluga, by Raffi
Week 18: The Boy Who Was Raised by Librarians, by Carla Morris
Week 19: The Great Sheep Shenanigans, by Peter Bently and Mei Matsuoka
Week 20: Turtle Splash! Countdown at the Pond, by Cathryn Falwell
Week 21: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, by Simms Taback
Week 22: Zombie in Love, by Kelly DiPucchio
Week 23: Proud as a Peacock, Brave as a Lion, by Jane Barclay
Week 24: A Poppy is to Remember, by Heather Patterson

Wow! So many books!

More and more kids are winning prizes by reading! Congratulations to Eleanor and Linaya for bringing back their reading sheets!

Our last Star Reader of the Week was also Eleanor!


Playing catch up from a previous Star Reader, here's Sloan receiving her prize!

 
 
This week's Star Reader is Carson! Congratulations!
 
 
Our twenty-fifth Book of the Week is a personal favourite of mine! "Love You Forever", by Robert Munsch.
 
 
"Love You Forever started as a song.
“I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
as long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.”
 
I made that up after my wife and I had two babies born dead. The song was my song to my dead babies. For a long time I had it in my head and I couldn’t even sing it because every time I tried to sing it I cried. It was very strange having a song in my head that I couldn’t sing.
For a long time it was just a song but one day, while telling stories at a big theatre at the University of Guelph, it occurred to me that I might be able to make a story around the song.
Out popped Love You Forever, pretty much the way it is in the book.
My regular publisher felt that it was not really a kid’s book and I ended up doing it with another publisher.
One day the publisher called up and said “This is very strange. It is selling very well in retirement communities in Arizona. It is selling in retirement communities where kids are illegal. This is supposed to be a children’s book. What is going on?”
“Grownups are buying it for grownups!”
In fact, it turned out that parents buy it for grandparents and grandparents buy it for parents and kids buy it for everybody and everybody buys it for kids.
As a matter of fact, everybody buys it for everybody. That’s why it sells a lot of copies. I think it’s my best book. So far it has sold about 15,000,000 copies.
Everybody makes up their own song for this book. I would like to put different versions of the song up on this site, now that the site has sound on it. If you send me your version, either as a tape or an audio file or a MR3 file, I will try to put it up in the LOVE YOU page. If lots of people send me their versions, I will not be able to put them all up, but I would like to hear them even if I can’t put them on the site.
The way I sing it in the story is just MY version. You are supposed to make up your own."
- Robert Munsch


Stay tuned for our next Star Reader and Book of the Week! Keep up the good reading!