My grandmother was born in Ireland, and the rest of my ancestors came from Ireland, so my family has always celebrated St. Patrick’s Day.  I am surprised and delighted when other nationalities join in the celebration.  Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised.  March is a long month, with no Monday holidays.  This year the winter has seemed longer than usual.  We need an excuse to party.

The first book I read at Dads and Donuts was The Luckiest St. Patrick’s Day Ever!  by Teddy Slater.  It had many details of a Leprechaun’s parade.  (We ended our storytime with a parade on the first floor – past the circulation desk.)

We will feature Laura Vaccaro Seeger  in our PlaySpace program this Tuesday morning for 2 and 3 year old children.  Green has many shades of the color green on its pages.  One page says “no green” and shows a page with snow.  The next page, however, is saturated with green grass with a seedling growing.

Beginning March 24, we will feature Byron Barton in our PlaySpace. I have read My Car in storytimes recently, which ends with the surprise that the person who drives his car to work is a bus driver. This book tells us about his day as a bus driver picking up and dropping off dogs and cats.

The next book opens with a bare brown tree that magically gets its leaves by tapping on pages.  We blow a kiss to the tree to get apples.  We pat the leaves to encourage them to turn into autumn colors.  And we clap our hands to bring …
the snow!  All the grownups groaned when they realized I had tricked them into clapping for snow.  Perhaps the author anticipated that reaction, because the next pages say, “Okay.  Be patient…  Wait!  Don’t Go!”  And then we see pictures of spring again.

~Maureen

For most of us, spring can’t get here soon enough!  So today we read a story about a pear tree and all the living things that live on or near it.

Thinking about all of spring’s bright colors brought us to another story:

Ask your child why peach crayon was embarrassed!  It was silly and fun to look at the world from the perspective of a box of crayons.

The library will be hosting a March Madness Tournament for Easy Reader Books.  We will start next week with 16 books – either stand alone titles or series.  Each week we will reduce the number by half until we have a winner during National Library Week in April.

I read some Easy Reader books in storytime as a sneak preview.

Perhaps you can guess how much I love this stand-alone book by the fact that the Main Library owns 5 copies and our branch owns 2.  (I also love Go, Dog. Go!  – by the same author.)

Elephant and Piggie books may win the tournament.  Everyone loves them.  We read Let’s Go for a Drive! today.  It was a Geisel Honor Book in 2013.  The American Library Association awards a Geisel medal (named for Theodor Seuss Geisel) for the most distinguished Easy Reader book each year.  Mo Willems won the Medal in 2008 for the Elephant and Piggie book There is a Bird on Your Head.  Willems has won a Geisel honor for the past 5 years – truly a distinguished author and illustrator, as well as a people’s choice favorite.   We own 7 copies of this as well.

Jon Scieszka is dedicated to making books that boys will love.  He has an Easy Reader series called Trucktown.  It stars many different kinds of trucks, illustrated by David Shannon, Loren Long and David Gordon.  Today we read Dizzy Izzy.  We danced the Hokey Pokey after reading that book.   A few of the children tried to get dizzy – none of the grownups did.  I noticed that the girls loved this book as well as the boys.

Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, with pictures by Maurice Sendak, is a classic easy reader – printed in 1957.  Many of us grew up with these gentle stories and still love them.  I will let grownups cast a ballot in our tournament for themselves and one for the child in their life.  The emotional attachment we carry all our lives for some of our favorite childhood books is amazing.

Our final book was Hi! Fly Guy.  This is another crowd favorite among the preschool set.  We already read a number of stories up to this point.  I was afraid the children would be too tired to listen quietly to Fly Guy.  I was wrong.  They sat very attentively, and so I read all 3 chapters.

Stay tuned for our brackets…

~Maureen

Looking for a change of pace in the weather, we read a story about going somewhere new:

Then we had lots of giggles with two stories about the ever-popular Elephant and Piggie: