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count on me + math quest cards
Count on Me by Miguel Tanco (2019).
This picture book has math on its mind. And so does its main character who tells the story.
Though it takes her a minute to figure out that just like her family and classmates, she has a passion too! It’s not science or painting or playing the tuba. It’s math! And not only numbers, but all kinds of shapes, patterns, and concepts, which appear throughout the nuanced neutral watercolor illustrations.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
This story inspires in two ways. One, it tells us that everyone has a passion, it’s just a matter of finding the one unique to you. And two, that math is in so many more places than your textbook. It’s all around us. It’ll be hard for a reader to look at the world in the same way after a tour from this math-loving child. It just might turn math into the magic of the everyday.
“Math is all around us. It’s often hidden, and I love finding it.”
Each spread is a veritable seek and find of math-related elements, even before it becomes the focus of the narrative. On the first page, the main character plays checkers (math!). Outside the window, bare tree branches adorn the landscape in delicate designs (math!).
And so it continues, with little bits to notice on this math expedition through the natural and human-made world, the pale, sandy and gray palette making shapes rather than color shine. You’ll also find a math glossary at the back titled “My math,” in honor of the notebook the character carries with her on certain spreads.
Count on Me is an inventive book that pays tribute a subject no one is ambivalent about and that shapes our surroundings in myriad ways. To math!
Big thanks to Tundra Books for images and a review copy!
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I knew there was a super cool math activity to go with this book, and I knew just the person to dream it up and show us how to do it. Cue Margaret, inspirational librarian and amazing crafter at Homemade City.
She’s sharing math quest cards with us today, perfect for that quote about math being hidden around us and the main character searching for it. This art project and math-in-nature search promises delight and discovery to anyone who makes and partakes of this project. Happy scavenger-hunting!
And, in exciting news, I must also mention that Margaret is the author of a picture book coming out from Charlesbridge in 2021, illustrated by Adam Gustavson: Flip: How the Frisbee Took Flight. Cannot wait!
Over to Margaret!
The curly-haired heroine of Count on Me by Miguel Tanco has a special love for math. While her dad has a passion for painting, her mom science, and her brother music (he plays a tuba twice his size), the smallest member of the family sees shapes and patterns everywhere. She skips stones to see concentric circles form and tracks the trajectory of a paper airplane. She finds math everywhere.
Tanco’s sweet story is followed by a book-within-a-book: the heroine’s math notebook that illustrates math concepts like fractals, polygons, curves, solid figures, trajectories and sets (in terms clear enough that even I can understand).
Inspired by the small heroine’s passion for math, I painted a deck of cards with basic concepts from the book to spark my own scavenger math hunt. If we take the time to notice, what patterns, polygons, circles, and curves can we discover in the world around us?
What you’ll need:
Art cards or index cards (I picked up these little Legion Paper samplers at my local craft store)
Pen, marker, and/or paint
The world!
I copied the math concepts illustrated in Count on Meand in an attempt to emulate Tanco’s delightful, watery illustrations, I used watercolor paint to tint them. However, young artists can skip the paint and get the job done easily enough with markers and crayons.
I drew and labeled the cards with a range of basic polygons, solid forms like cones and cylinders, patterns of concentric circles and curves, and other concepts to create a deck of 25 cards. Then my son and I went hunting through the house and around our neighborhood. This is some of what we found:
We discovered so many surprises: dandelion fluff fractals, milk carton polygons, the curved trajectory of a Frisbee in flight. What will you find?
Thank you, Margaret, for this creative math scavenger hunt activity!
Margaret Muirhead is the author of Mabel One and Only (Dial Books for Young Readers) as well as Flip: How the Frisbee Took Flight, a nonfiction picture book slated for Fall 2021 with Charlesbridge Publishing. By day, you can find her wearing cat glasses and cardigans as a children’s librarian. In her free time, she makes wacky, colorful crafts at homemade city.
You might also like Margaret’s amazing pop-up paper craft for Blue Rider by Geraldo Valério. Check it out!
how to make friends with a ghost + marshmallow ghosts from Sincerely, Syl!
How to Make Friends with a Ghost by Rebecca Green (2017).
This is a dear, dear picture book. As the title implies, it contains a guide to making friends with a phantom written by Dr. Phantoneous Spookel, leading ghost expert and poet, and stars one sweet girl and one sweet companion ghost.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
The tone is at once quirky, inventive, and sincere and what gets me the most are the details. There’s a warning not to put your hand through a ghost as that can cause a tummy ache. There’s advice on hiding a ghost in a tissue box when guests come over. It’s those creative bits like bath time in a cauldron, bedtime lullabies of “eerie hums and wails,” and snack time of earwax truffles that truly delight.
The guide has three parts: ghost identification, ghost basics, and growing up with your ghost. The last one takes the main character all the way into adulthood, a certain spirit always by her side. And the ending plays with the idea of a friendship that lasts and lasts and truly goes on forever. You’ll seeeeeee!
Rebecca Green‘s illustrations have those same qualities as the text—quirky and inventive while also being sincere and gentle. This tender ghost story is a win all around.
Big thanks to Tundra Books/Penguin Random House Canada for images!
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Baker and cook extraordinaire, Sylvia of Sincerely, Syl, is here with a vanilla marshmallow ghost recipe to bring the sweet ghost from the story to life!! Sylvia works for Tundra, the publisher of How to Make Friends with a Ghost, and we’ve been wanting to collaborate for some time. And then we found the perfect fall book, and Sylvia devised the perfect craft, complete with the ghost’s small mouth (that eats a lot) and rosy cheeks. Plus, each ghost is satisfyingly squishy!!
Vanilla Marshmallows
Makes enough to fill an 8 x 12 x 2 baking pan
½ cup water
3 envelopes unflavored gelatin
Unsalted butter, melted
2 cups granulated sugar
½ cup golden corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup water
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
Icing sugar
- Using the bowl from your stand mixer, pour in the water and gelatin. Let it sit so that the gelatin can bloom.
- Brush the melted butter onto the base and side of your baking pan. Set it aside.
- Add the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and the other half cup of water into a medium saucepan over high heat. Bring it to a rolling boil and let it boil for about a minute. Then remove it from the heat.
- Fit your stand mixer with the whisk attachment and turn it on low to mix the water and gelatin that’s already in the bowl until it combines. Then very slowly and carefully, add the hot sugar and corn syrup mixture into the bowl.
- Still mixing on low, add the vanilla extract.
- When everything is in the bowl, turn the mixer to high and whisk for 10 minutes until the batter turns white and triples in size.
- Stop the mixer, using a spatula, scrape the marshmallow batter into the baking pan. Spread the batter evenly and do your best to level it. A bench scraper or off-set spatula can help.
- Cover the pan with aluminum foil, be sure not to touch the batter otherwise it’ll stick. Or use a lid if your baking pan comes with one. Leave the marshmallow to set at room temperature overnight or in the fridge.
- The next day, take the foil off and sprinkle icing sugar over the top. Cover the surface evenly so that it won’t be too sticky to handle. Run a knife along the edge of the pan to help loosen the marshmallow slab. Then carefully flip the marshmallow out onto a counter. Sprinkle icing sugar all over the marshmallow – don’t forget the sides.
- Use a knife to cut them into squares or roll a cookie cutter in icing sugar before using it on the marshmallow.
Check out that squishy sweetness!
And more creations are over at Sincerely, Syl. Thank you so much for making these most delightful marshmallow ghosts, Sylvia! (Here’s her post with lots of photos!)
Sylvia Chan lives in Toronto, Ontario with a growing collection of books and kitchen supplies. During the day, she works in marketing and publicity for a children’s publishing house. On her time off, Sylvia loves to bake, eat, photograph, draw, and travel. Follow along at sincerely.syl on Instagram or visit her blog at www.sincerelysyl.com.
this is sadie + interview with sara o’leary + fox masks
This is Sadie by Sara O’Leary and Julie Morstad (out May 12th!).
This picture book is about a girl and her imagination. She’s a reader, of course. But a maker, too. She’s a child being a child, during those magical times in a secure childhood when there is little expected of you but to use your imagination.
It’s wondrous in story and concept and artwork. I already know it will be one of my favorites from 2015 and a book to cherish always.
I was lucky enough to ask Sara O’Leary, one of my favorite authors and people, questions about writing the book. And she answered them!
(You know I’m a fan because I posted about When I Was Small my very first month of this blog!)
(click image(s) to enlarge)
See those first lines? Those are some of my favorite first lines of a picture book EVER.
This Picture Book Life: Can you tell me about those first lines? Was that the original start of the book?
Sara O’Leary: I wasn’t really conscious of this until you asked this question, but no, those first lines weren’t in the opening of the first draft. And as I go through line-by-line I see that nothing of that first draft survived verbatim into the words now on the page!
When I started working with Tara on revising the manuscript she got me to go through and make myself a dummy copy with illustrations. And to be honest, I’d never done this before even though it was something I’d counselled students to do. And when I went through that process it helped me to start thinking of the story visually and I arrived at the idea that I wanted the story to open out from Sadie rather than opening with her. And then I thought of the way kids play with boxes. My own son when he was small would play Jack-in-the-Box for what seemed like hours at a stretch.
And so that’s how we got to the box on the first page. But once we agreed on that idea of Sadie being concealed to begin with, it ended up influencing the choices we made when it came to the cover. And that’s how Sadie ended up wearing her little fox mask–which I now love.
Notice that fox stuffed animal? He pops up again and again. I really like that fox.
TPBL: Was the fox your idea or did Julie Morstad add in the fox on her own?
Sara O’Leary: There was a fox in the first draft of the story–a line about how when she grew up Sadie might get married and how she might marry a fox or a tin soldier but that she was in no hurry. And then the idea of her little fox family came in later. And then once Julie had added that into Sadie’s imaginative world I found that we didn’t need the line of text anymore. That happened a few times.
My favourite joke in the whole book is when the text says that Sadie is quiet in the mornings because old people need a lot of sleep and then we see Sadie merrily hammering away. My second favourite is when she “tidies her room” and we see everything madly stuffed underneath her bed. That sort of friction between the text and image pleases me inordinately.
It’s very strange because this is my fourth book with the fabulous Julie Morstad but it’s the first that really and truly feels like a collaboration rather than a co-creation. It’s partly a product of working with Tara Walker who is an absolute genius of a picture book editor–an Ursula Nordstrom for our times. It’s also partly a product of knowing Julie and her work so well that I was kind of writing the book for her this time and imagining it as a way of showcasing just what she can do.
“For me it started with the idea of her as a small girl
with a big imagination.”
A shout out to Julie Morstad here. This illustration stops me in my tracks. Luminous.
TPBL: What elements did Julie include that delighted or surprised you? What is your favorite illustration?
Sara O’Leary: There’s not a single illustration in this book I don’t love. My very favourites though are the picture book spreads–the entry of this new character into narratives that were part of my own childhood. It’s almost like stepping through the looking glass yourself. And for sheer beauty I love the fairy tale spread more than any other spread not just in this book but maybe in any book in existence. I love how brave and fierce and yet serene Sadie looks. When I was a kid my favourite poem was Isabel, Isabel by Ogden Nash and I see that in this image too. That little girl who bravely ate the bear up.
TPBL: Tell us a little bit about you as a child.
Sara O’Leary: I was very spoiled as a child in the sense that for my first five years I was an only child and my mother always had paints and clay and books and blocks and things for me to busy myself with–so that being a child who likes to “make and do and be” is very familiar to me. I was also, judging by the snapshots, a boy for about fifty per cent of my existence and so I like to think that like Sadie I could as easily imagine myself into being Mowgli as the Little Mermaid. And I kind of think it must be the same for Julie. The Alice in Wonderland spread came back to me and I was both pleased and amazed to realise that rather than placing Sadie in the role of Alice she had chosen to portray her as the Mad Hatter. It’s perfect!
Sadie is such a composite at this point that I find it hard to claim that she is really like me. She is but she is also like my kids, and like Julie and her kids, and also, I think, like our editor (and third collaborator) Tara Walker. I hope that she’s very easy to project yourself into–a bit like Sendak’s Max. A friend read the book and said: “Oh, you wrote this book just for me!” and really that’s about the best compliment you could hope for. Sadie’s pretty much childhood and imagination embodied for me.
Thanks to Sara for being so generous and talking with me about this magical book!
And to the wonderful people at Tundra Books for images!
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FOX MASKS!
This is Sadie‘s own activity kit includes a printable fox mask like the one Sadie wears on the cover!
And ever creative Kellie who made a peg doll in honor of Viva Frida has made one for Sadie over on her site! And Sadie’s wearing the fox mask! Here are some more:
Check out this super sweet paper plate fox mask too from mom.me.
You can go a step further with this felt DIY version from Fercute.
And I adore this paper maché mask from Ambeau!
Here’s another printable from Little Gatherer with a unique design.
Finally, this one’s for sale at KissMeGo.
With Sara O’Leary’s generosity, I’m giving away two This Is Sadie book jacket/posters over on twitter! (It features Sara (and my!) favorite spread from the book.) Come find me there and enter to win one!
an armadillo in paris + eiffel towers + giveaway
An Armadillo in Paris by Julie Kraulis.
This picture book is the February Tundra Books book club selection. And it’s perfect for dreaming of a springtime in PARIS. (Not that I’ve been to Paris. But I will remedy that, oh yes I will.)
Here are three things I love about this book:
1. The unexpected choice of an ARMADILLO as its main character.
(click image(s) to enlarge)
I mean, an armadillo! Named Arlo! Driving that red car on the cover and exploring Paris just as his grandfather had many years before! Wearing that adorable French-colored scarf around his neck!
The contrast of an armored little Brazilian mammal with the city of Paris is just odd enough to be perfect.
2. The MYSTERY of the Iron Lady.
Arlo’s grandfather’s travel journals tell Arlo where to go in the city and how each relates to the Iron Lady for whom Arlo searches. For a kid reader who doesn’t know who the Iron Lady is, the guessing is so much fun!
Each stop on the journey is a clue: the CAFE named after the architect who designed her; the LOUVRE, which houses the 1889 World’s Fair Exhibit—this mysterious lady was the official greeter at the fair.
Macarons are compared to buttons the Iron Lady possesses. She is said to sparkle like the Luxembourg pond. On and on through all the stops in Paris.
Until…voilà! She is revealed! And she is the Eiffel Tower. (Some of you knew that all along, didn’t you?) And along the way you get to visit many magnifique places in Paris.
3. Kraulis’s ARTWORK.
I especially love the way Arlo himself is rendered: always a pencil sketch. He’s plain and simple and anatomically correct. He looks like a scientific drawing and that’s a very inventive choice. (Not to mention his sweet, shiny eyes.)
He’s surrounded by the colors and people and magic of Paris. Dresses and macaroons and posters and bright yellow trees. Dreamy water and dreamy sky.
Arlo is a little like us, no? Creatures who want to experience something special. Something more magnificent than we are. And that is why we go on adventures.
The book ends with some amazing facts about the Eiffel Tower that explain the allusions from Arlo’s grandfather’s journals. For example:
“The Iron Lady is covered in 20,000 light bulbs that took 25 mountain climbers 5 months to install. She really does sparkle!”
Thanks to Tundra Books for images!
Tundra is also generously providing one copy of An Armadillo in Paris for a reader! Not only that, the package will include a poster with a reading guide as well as a handful of beautiful postcards, ready to send from your next adventure! (Open to N. America only.)
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Eiffel Tower goodies!
Eiffel Tower scissors by Seasonal Supplies on etsy.
TomKat Studios Eiffel Tower cookie DIY.
Baker’s Joy Macaron Eiffel Tower poster.
Finally, for anyone who wants to build their own cardboard and foil Eiffel Tower, directions from Oh Happy Day!
