A Couple Kids And a Storyhour

It takes only a couple kids to provide the sound effects for Walter the Farting Dog Trouble at the Yard Sale *

*Wm. Katzwinkle & Glenn Murray, Dutton Children's Books

Photo: Story Teller, Amy Grasley; Thank you, Eric and Christopher.

School is Out ~ Watch for Our Kids! Have a Safe and Happy Summer.

Happy Canada Day

July 1, 2010

~ Neat Little Bookshop

Closed for the Holiday

(Photo: Lighthouse Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada.)

~ Happy Birthday Canada

A House Without Books???

"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices."

~ Horace Mann (1796 - 1859) American Education Reformer, U.S. House of Representatives, brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Quotes are Tremendous, Charlie E. Jones, Executive Books, 1995.

Thought for Today:

"With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."

~ Abraham Lincoln, (1809 - 1865), 16th American President

(Week of the G8 and G20 Summit, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2010.)

Your Smile for Today:

"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It is jolted by every pebble on the road."

~ Henry Ward Beecher, Social reformer, clergyman, author, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Robert Munsch ~ "Kids Get Up and Leave"

"Kids either keep laughing, or, if they don't like the story, they get up and leave. That's the honest feedback I depend on."

Children's author, Robert Munsch, made up 519 stories over two years and read them to kids in the day-care center where he worked at the time. Out of those 519 stories, he had ten "good stories."
"For a story to be worthy of becoming a book, it must pass a series of tests," Munsch explains. He tells it in the city, in the country, in the north of Canada, the south and then into the Arctic. "Sometimes a story isn't publishable simply because it's too tightly woven into one particular community" he says. *

Every Wednesday is Story Hour in The Neat Little Bookshop. We can vouch for Munsch's theory. Kids love books. They love a good story read with enthusiasm ~ and they get up and leave if they don't like the story.

For first-time authors this is helpful advice: Read aloud to a live audience. (Find Thumper the Rabbit in the red towel; Gizmo the Pekingese on the stool.) You may have to click on photo for larger image.

*Meet the Authors and Illustrators, Deborah Kovacs and James Preller, Scholastic 1991.

Family Holidays

(For larger image, click on photo ~ Lorna)