I was planning to just do one blog entry per day for Children's Book Week but it struck me as wrong that I've only posted about male authors so far. Few children's authors have infiltrated my life as much as Sandra Boynton has. Before I started reading her books with kids, I enjoyed her greeting cards and have been known to sing the words "Hippo Birdie Two Ewes" to the tune of the birthday song. I've been listening to songs from Philadelphia Chickens since early in 2003 and already owned her other book/CD combos long before Emmett's birth.
We often start our day by reading Hey, Wake Up and end it with The Going To Bed Book. Our bedtime ritual also often includes singing Pajama Time and Silly Lullaby from Philadelphia Chickens. During the day, we often read or sing one or more of her other books, with Barnyard Dance and Your Personal Penguin as current favorites.
What I love about Boynton books is the emphasis on silliness. Take, for example, a few lines from "Silly Lullaby":
The chickens in the bathtub
The closet full of sheep
The sneakers in the freezer
Are all drifting off to sleep...
The animals in Sandra Boynton's books have a lot of personality, whether they are show-stealing aardvarks or hippopotamuses who really know how to have a party. These books are fun to read over and over.
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Hippos Go Berserk was the first board book I bought when I got pregnant with my daughter, and almost 10 years later I still have it memorized! Boynton has a talent for writing books that I can read over and over without wanting to hide the book under the sofa. But Not the Hippopotamus was another big hit, too.
ReplyDeleteWhenever people leave my house after visiting, I think of that last page of Hippos Go Berserk where the one hippo left misses the other 44 hippos. (I also think of it when guests arrive in a sack.)
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