Boni AshburnCritiques

Rhyming, counting, and an impatient baby dragon - charming! (And no one at the castle gets eaten: the dragons put on a fireworks show in the sky.)

The narrator, with brown skin and dark hair, has a "favoritest dress ever" that she wears on her favorite day of the week (Tuesday)...but one day, it's too small! She asks her mama to make something out of it, and voila...it becomes a ruffly shirt. The pattern continues, with the original dress being remade into a shirt, skirt, scarf, socks, hair bow, and finally a piece of art.

A sweet story that will resonate with anyone who's ever grown out of a favorite item of clothing. Julia Denos' artwork makes the story sing, with plenty of sewist touches - even some of the text looks stitched.

See also: Joseph Had A Little Overcoat by Simms Taback

A fun and fashionable read! Also contains lessons on not getting upset about small things, fixing problems, and reusing material!

This brightly illustrated picture book gives young readers a look at the first day of school for kindergarteners. The author examines the daily accidents and mishaps, and explores several different backgrounds and personalities as the children get ready for school.

Over at the Castle is a cute counting book that tells us about a kingdom and those who live in it, including two dragons. I enjoyed the rhyming, it gave the story a nice pace. I think children will enjoy it as well, the rhyming is repetitive, so they will probably be able to catch on and follow along aloud. The counting is great and done interestingly, each time the story goes to a different part of the kingdom, rhyming the entire time. The characters are also charming, I particularly enjoyed the part where we see the dungeons and a prisoner plotting his escape with his rat friends. I think young readers will enjoy those quirks as well as the dragons in the story.
The illustrations are colorful and descriptive, showing us what is happening in the story along with the text. The color palette is muted, giving the story that extra feeling of an old story told long ago. Overall, a fun read with cute characters.

Jack wanted to build a fort. He collected items from all around the house. Then one by one each family member came to take the items Jack was using back. Jack was started to get frustrated as each person wanted there items then when his grandma asked for the quilt. Jack felt he needed to share the quilt with his grandma. The point of the story is if you are going to use peoples items you need to be able to share.

Age:4-5
Source:Barnes and Noble

Absolutely loved this story of twenty kids getting ready for their first day of school. Rhyming text and illustrations on a white background make this perfect for younger picture book readers, but older ones can still enjoy it too! The kids are a diverse bunch in terms of gender, ethnicity/race, and personal style ("Five pull on their favorite jeans. Two are fashionista queens. Four wear shirts their mothers chose. One inspects her freckled nose"), and there's a set of fraternal twins as well. The kids have very different feelings about going to school for the first time, allowing readers to find one that matches their own feelings, as well as helping them understand how others might be feeling differently.

This book has poems that are about construction and building things. These poems are nursery rhythms that are refashioned to feature construction. All or most of these poems are rhyming poems.

Over at the Castle, readers get to see the different thing that happen at the castle and what each person does as well as dragons.

Using the classic nursery rhyme and cumulative tale This Is the House That Jack Built as an inspiration, author Boni Ashburn spins the story of a young boy and his imaginative games of make believe in this entertaining picture-book. Borrowing items from all of his family members, the eponymous Jack builds a fantastic fort in the living room, only to watch it disassembled piece by piece as siblings and parents reclaim their property. In the end, when grandma comes looking for her quilt, he learns an important lesson about sharing...

With a rollicking, rhyming text - the original is a classic for a reason, after all! - and entertaining illustrations, The Fort That Jack Built would make an excellent read-aloud selection at story-time. I appreciated the depiction offered here of a young boy's exuberant creativity and his pursuit of his imaginary ideal, and the gentle lesson offered at the end regarding the right and wrong way to appropriate other people's belongings. The artwork by Brett Helquist, probably best known for his work on Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events novels, is colorful and quirky, capturing the humor and fun to be found in the text. Recommended to Helquist fans, and to anyone looking for children's stories about the power of the imagination and/or the importance of balancing one's own activities with those of other family members.

Summary: This book revolves around a mother and baby dragon. The mother dragon offers the baby dragon all sorts of things or rather, people, to eat such as a queen, king, knights and many more. The mother dragon won't stop until her baby is content and full.

Critique of Genre: Fantasy because the story is told through the eyes of the mother dragon who is talking to her baby dragon throughout the story about who she'll bring him for dinner. This is fantasy because that's a supernatural ability for animals to be able to think and talk like that.

Age: Primary

Media: 2008

This book is about twenty young children who are from nineteen different home. They are getting ready for their first day of kindergarten. As we see each of them getting up for school that morning, some are nervous, eager, and small number were very grumpy. No matter the mood that morning they go dressed, pack their backpacks and eat their healthy breakfast before they leave out of the house for the day. This is their first day meeting their Kindergarten teacher and becoming a class all together. The central message is that we all come from different home each day but still end up in the same classroom to learn the same materials.

“The Class” is a story about students getting ready in the morning before their first day of Kindergarten. The story takes you through the different characters and how they each get ready in the morning, they all have different routines, different personalities, different attitudes toward school, and how they all look differently. The stories message is about how all students are different and how they all come from different backgrounds but they all come together in front of the teacher in their classroom at school. This story allows students to connect to at least one character in the story in some way due to all the differences in the multiple characters that are displayed.

Clever, charming, fun enough to read again and again which is good because your child will likely want you to do so. Maybe not necessary, as I'm kinda bored of castles, and would rather see Over in the Meadow" reworked for the 21st century, but dragon stories sell, so this is fine."

Distraught when her favorite dress, always worn on her favorite day (Tuesday) becomes too small to wear, the young heroine of this charming picture-book turns to her mother, and "Snip, Snip, Sew, Sew... New shirt, Hello!" This new garment soon becomes the young girl's favorite piece of clothing, always worn on her (new) favorite day, Wednesday. As time goes on, the erstwhile dress becomes smaller and smaller, transformed into a tank top, a skirt, a scarf, and a hair-bow. When even this is destroyed, a final use is made of the remnants of the beloved garment, enabling the girl to hold on to her memories...

I'm grateful to my friend Gundula for reviewing this sweet book, as I had initially passed it by, thinking it to be a fairly standard 'dressing up' story. There's nothing wrong with dressing-up stories, of course, when done right - children learn through imitation, after all, and many young people experiment by dressing up in their parents' clothing, or by wearing costumes of various kinds - but I somehow wasn't attracted to it. I'm glad that I read a review putting me right, however, as I Had a Favorite Dress turned out to be a charming tale of a girl and her mother, and their creative use of sewing to repurpose a beloved article of clothing, rather than just throwing it away. I appreciated both the frugality and artistry involved in the process being depicted in the story, and thought the accompanying artwork, done in watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, needle and thread, and digital collage, perfectly captured the sense of fun throughout. I also appreciated the fact that mother and daughter are African-American, but that this is not commented upon at all in text or artwork, as I think we need more lighthearted books featuring diverse characters. Recommended to anyone looking for fun and creative mother-daughter tales, or stories incorporating sewing-craft and clothing issues.

This is a cute story about a mother dragon and her baby and what happens at a nearby castle. The two dragons are preparing for something, we know not what, and are waiting for the right moment. In the meantime, we see what goes on inside the castle.

The dragons can be seen in the background peeking over walls and the like while the townspeople go about their business. This cute and comical but also helps create an air of suspense. It was also the thing my son enjoyed most about the book. I will not mention what actually happens.

Cute story. Really nice illustrations. I would recommend this for young children, age 3-7.

Jack has collected items from around the house and built a fort. His family keeps coming up and taking back their things and tearing down pieces of Jack's fort. When Grandma comes in feeling cold, Jack gives her the quilt, which was the final piece of his fort.
Ages: 4-8
Source: Pierce County Library

My initial reaction was ugh another reworked bunch of Mother Goose rhymes. And although I'm still not so thrilled about that I have to admit it was quite good for the fans of construction type books.... Which I am not.

Read this with both kids and O loved it. She would tell me what the original nursery rhyme was for each one.

33 months - Oh this is so going to be Olivia and I someday soon. She loves her tutus and I can just see her favorites slowly evolving into smaller and smaller fashion accessories as they get too small and/or become worse for wear. Very creative and cute idea.

On one hand, the illustrations are fun to scan to see what the dragons are up to while the castle going ons are happening. On the other hand, they are inconsistent. On one hand, the rhyme shows a bit of what went on in a castle. On the other hand, the language is a little complex at times for a visiting library class with a range of vocab.... which leads to my conclusion. A good book for one on one, cozy, castle & dragon reading and character seeking.

Read during daylight hours only, as this book might inspire children to raise heck during actual bedtime. Perfect for a winding down story, for after lunch or recess.

This fun story is set to the classic folk melody "Over in the Meadow" as well as an introduction using "Hush, Little Dragon", it has catchy rhythmic patterns.
Throughout the day at the castle everyone is keeping busy. There are two guards watching the moat, three young lords playing by the old willow tree, four servants doing the chores, and many more all the way to the ten guards. Then finally at the end of the day, the patient little baby dragon and his mother fly into the dark sky, lighting it up with their flames.

Great book about a little dragon who's unhappy and his mother does everything to help him. Kids loved to sing on long to the story and found the dragon side funny.

bed time lullaby
cute rhymes
baby dragon whose mama dragon snatches queens, kings, knights to feed her baby.
Mother-son relationship
early-childhood story

I can relate to this book because I have a dress that I love and I don't want to throw it out even thought I don't fit it anymore. The illustrator did a really good job with the illustration. Feels like the picture is in 3-D. I love how she loves her dress so much that she couldn't get rid of it so she made it into different piece of clothing she could.