Publications about books for children and young adults
The star of Benji Davies’s Bizzy Bear board book series and the Bizzy Bear On the Farm app returns in Bizzy Bear Builds a House (Nosy Crow, July 2012). Based on Bizzy Bear: Let’s Get to Work, this app invites toddlers to pitch in around a construction site with Bizzy, completing tasks such as digging [...]
These iOS app versions of beloved preschool favorites are great choices for promoting early digital literacy. They honor the original books in tone and structure but add a little extra oomph with thoughtfully selected interactive elements. The Pat the Bunny app updates Dorothy Kunhardt’s lift-the-flap classic with new opportunities to play with Paul, Judy, and [...]
Caillou Stickers! (Night & Day Studios and Cookie Jar Entertainment, July 2012) is a straightforward digital sticker book for the preschool set. Users select one of seven backgrounds such as a schoolyard, birthday party, campsite, and park, then drag and drop brightly colored images of well-known PBS character Caillou, his friends, family, pets, and toys [...]
At the meeting when the Horn Book staff decided starred reviews for the May/June Magazine issue, we read aloud Marianne Dubuc’s picture book Animal Masquerade. It took a good fifteen minutes (each one of them absolutely delightful). The app In Front of My House (Winged Chariot, 2011) based on Dubuc’s book of the same title, [...]
In Bobo Explores Light by Game Collage (September 2011; updated June 2012), Bobo, a cute robot with an appropriately light bulb–like head, is our guide for a quick trip through the solar system toward the sun—and from there, onto a discussion of light in its many forms. Bobo takes users on a roughly chronological review [...]
Being a big Disney/Pixar fan, I went to see the new movie Brave on opening weekend. Brave is the story of Merida, an independent, archery-loving young Scottish princess who longs to control her own destiny despite her mother’s wish to marry her off. When a magic spell Merida buys from a witch turns her mother [...]
Pip and Posy: Fun and Games (Nosy Crow, April) is based on Axel Scheffler’s picture book series featuring the two young friends. In the books, Posy, a mouse, and Pip, a rabbit, help each other navigate “the dramas of toddler life” such as learning to share, coping with “accidents,” and working out disagreements. As the [...]
Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s young adult novel Chopsticks (Penguin/Razorbill, February 2012) tells the story of seventeen-year-old piano prodigy Gloria Fleming. Lonely Glory seems to have little in her life but her music and her demanding father/teacher; her mother died several years ago. Then Frank Mendoza, a recent arrival from Argentina, moves in next door, [...]
Barefoot Books collaborated with developer Touch Press on a digital companion to their Barefoot Books World Atlas written by Nick Crane and illustrated by David Dean (November 2011). The atlas’s introduction explains that unlike most atlases, it’s organized by region rather than continent, partly to emphasize how “people in different parts of the world have [...]
Like you (I’m guessing), I felt my soul give a little lurch at the news that Encyclopaedia Britannica was getting out of the book business to go online, all the time. Part of my reaction was nostalgia—when I was a child we owned the first four or five volumes of some encyclopedia that my parents [...]
