New Books: Trains Go/I'm Fast!

 We have two young boys, so trains have been a major theme of our home for quite some time. The three-year-old grows more fascinated with them daily, his interest waxing conveniently apace with his older brother's moving on to other things, like the new Wii that Santa brought this year. (This has all worked out particularly well in regard to all the Thomas paraphernalia we bought for Dash when he was this age. Something is working out according to plan, for once!)

And while it's merely days old, 2012 has already been a banner year for train books. Griff has two new bedside standbys, both actually the latest in larger, um, vehicular series. The first is the board book Trains Go, by Steve Light, whose vivid illustrations and suitably onomatopoeic text lead us through various train types—freight, old steam, new steam, diesel, the beloved caboose. Trains Go stands out among the many train-related board books on the market, and it instantly became a favorite.

Griff has been asking for it in combination, of late, with Kate and Jim McMullan's I'm Fast!, the latest in their oeuvre that began with the garbage-truck saga I Stink! (another of Griff's faves, incidentally, especially in its Scholastic video version). This one recounts a race to Chicago between a freight train and a red sports car, both personified in the usual brightly aggressive McMullan manner.

Jim McMullan's illustrations just leap off the page—before I ever saw these books, I knew him best for his series of now-classic Lincoln Center Theater posters—and his talent for still images that shimmer with motion is in evidence here. And the tone of Kate McMullan's text, which combines the usual train sounds (why would any children's author resist them?) with short, snappy lines of train monologue that quickly establish the train's confident but benign character. I'm pretty sure Griff identifies with it. (Should that alarm me?)

[Cover images courtesy of Chronicle Books (Trains Go) and HarperCollins (I'm Fast!)]

New DVDs: Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman...and More Spooky Halloween Stories

I've written a few times before about the wonderful Scholastic Storybook Treasures series of DVDs, which created animated shorts out of kid-lit classics past and present. For Halloween, they've got a new one out: Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman . . . and More Spooky Halloween Stories, aimed at kids ages 4 to 9. It packages together five shorts, including the old-school-scary title story (this video was originally made way back in 1980) by Barbara K. Walker, and narrated with panache by Marie Rosulková.

We're big fans of just about every video in this series, but since (as I think I've mentioned before) our older son is a mini Tim Burton, obsessed with all things spooky and creepy, this DVD happens to be one of his all-time favorites. If you have a little one with similar leanings, or just need a good Halloween-themed video for the kids this year, you can't go wrong with this one.

Update: New Kideo, the company that puts out these Scholastic DVDs, is having a giveaway of this very one (plus another one) on Facebook currently! 

[Image courtesy of Scholastic Storybook Treasures]

2010 Wrap: DVDs

I'll get back to my final toys wrap-up post shortly, but I'm going to insert my video-of-the-year post first. It's not precisely the best movie or video we saw in 2010—that'd be Toy Story 3, predictably enough—but I figure few parents need me to tell them about movies they've probably seen already, and certainly have had ample chance to read reviews of. So other than to say we also liked How to Train Your Dragon quite a bit more than we expected to, I'll leave the big studio DVD releases alone.

Likewise, you know what TV shows your kids like best, and thus what TV-show collections you might want to own on DVD. (And these days, with DVRs and Netflix on-demand and 24-hour programming on Nick Jr. and the Disney Channel, who really needs DVDs of TV shows anyway?)

But there is one category of DVD that isn't as well advertised, or as much talked about, as Pixar movies and PBS Kids shows: the Scholastic Storybook Treasures DVDs. (For those unfamiliar, these are simply-animated versions of picture-book classics old and new, by everyone from Sendak to Willems.) I've sung the collection's praises before in this space—honestly, it's been our main video go-to for years now.

And our favorite of this year’s new releases in the series would have to be The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, from Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's typically clever twist on the original tale. (If you don't know the wonderful book, it's narrated by "Alexander T. Wolf," who attempts to explain how his devastation of the first two pigs' homes and his attacks on the lives of all three were all just a big misunderstanding.) In the animated version—the art, as always in these videos, taken directly from the original illustrations—Paul Giamatti has a great time doing the voice of the seemingly earnest wolf. Our family enjoyed it an awful lot ourselves; it's one of those DVDs where you find yourself sneaking into the room to watch with your kids even when you were supposed to be, I don't know, making dinner or something. Giamatti's performance is irresistible.

Also as usual with these DVDs, the lead story is packaged with a bunch from the Scholastic Storybook back catalog with loosely similar themes. (Wallace's Lists, adapted from a book I didn't know and narrated nicely by Zach Braff, has also been popular with the boys.)

[Image courtesy of Scholastic Storybook Treasures]

Security Blanket: Scholastic Storybook Treasures

Among all the kids’ stuff scattered around our homes, there are those precious go-to items: the books, music, videos, and games our kids return to again and again, which we parents learn to prize as old reliables. I’ll be using this Security Blanket feature to highlight some of our family’s tried-and-true favorites. (If you have some of your own, let me know in Comments!)

First off is the cream of our DVD crop, the endearingly huge Scholastic Storybook Treasures series. These discs generally contain between four and eight short video adaptations each of classic children’s books, including a gaggle of Caldecott and Newberry winners, from Where the Wild Things Are to Knuffle Bunny. Most of the videos are fairly basic: very simple animation or even still images taken from the actual picture book’s illustrations, accompanied by an actor’s reading of the text; occasionally, one will go outside the lines a bit. (There’s a surprising live-action version of Corduroy, for instance.)

Many of these adaptations were also clearly made long ago, especially the older classics (say, Harold and the Purple Crayon and its sequels), and these have their own particular charm. But pretty much every single one does a great job of capturing the specific tone and feel of the book it’s adapting, and our sons find them riveting.

They also seem to have been designed to fit parental needs: Each animated book is fairly short, about 10 or 15 minutes, so you can safely drop the kids in front of them while you’re making dinner without worrying about how you’re going to pry them away midstream. With our eldest son, we’ve even got a negotiation system down: Two “books,” and then it’s time to stop for dinner. (OK, OK, three.)

Now, it’s easy to overindulge in the thought that there’s something “better” about these videos, compared to ones not based on classic kids’ books—they still are watching, not reading, here. Still, it seems to me that many of these videos have increased Dash’s interest in the corresponding books (if he has them) or led him to seek out the books at the library or bookstore (if he doesn’t). There’s a link to reading that you just don’t get with most videos.

After first discovering the Scholastic videos, we went whole-hog and got an immense boxed set of them, but they’re available à la carte, too, in dazzling variety and range. Each DVD loosely groups its books  by theme: African folk tales (Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears, perhaps our family’s consensus favorite, with the title story and several others read by James Earl Jones); spooky stories (The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, which also includes a suitably creepy version of the old Eastern European folk tale Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman that delights Dash); books by a certain prominent author (The Snowy Day—retitled The Ezra Jack Keats Collection sometime after we got it—which also includes a bunch of lesser-known but equally excellent stories by the writer).

Perhaps best of all, New Video keeps coming out with new Scholastic entries. The latest additions to the canon are He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands and Runaway Ralph, the first a set of stories celebrating the environment, the second featuring another live-action video of the Beverly Cleary book. There’s something (and more than one) for every kid in this collection—and as with everything I intend to place under the Security Blanket rubric, I don’t know what we’d do without them.

[Photos: Courtesy of New Video.]