Things to Do
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
With playful prose and vivid art, Things to Do brings to life the small moments and secret joys of a child's day. There are wonders everywhere. In the sky and on the ground—blooming in a flower bed, dangling from a silken thread, buzzing through the summer air—waiting ...waiting to be found. In this thoughtful and ingenious collection of poems, Elaine Magliaro, an elementary school teacher for more than three decades and a school librarian for three years, and illustrator Catia Chien provide a luminous glimpse of the ordinary wonders all around us. Plus, this is the fixed format version, which looks almost identical to the print edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newcomer Magliaro constructs a series of whimsical to-do lists whose headers ("Things to do if you are dawn") offer witty counterpoints to the bursts of poetry that follow: "Shoo away night./ Wash the eastern sky with light./ Wake the sleeping sun:/ Rise and shine!" Magliaro excels at finding powerful verbs ("Flit among flowers./ Sip nectar for hours./ Be yellow and fuzzy./ Stay busy. Be buzzy"), her rhymes are tight and inventive, the vocabulary is challenging without being stilted, and the tempo of each poem varies. Ever thought about being an eraser? "Go on wear yourself out!" The moon? "Hang in the darkness./ Dazzle the night." Chien (A Boy and a Jaguar) works in gauzy fields of color, following a dark-haired child and a dog through these flights of imagination the child jumps off a swing and soars into space like a falling acorn, and later stares at the stars as crickets "Rub wings/ and sing/ a lullaby." Magliaro's observations are scientific in their precision and joyous in tone lovely for parent and child to share, and equally rich as a writing prompt. Ages 3 5.
