The Ultimate Treasure Quest 1: The Jewel of Peru: Book Review

As a Tomoson Blogger, I get the opportunity to read and review books for FREE!
When I saw this I thought it would be great to read with my boys, after all it has a ship and an ultimate treasure quest!

I gave this book a rating of 3 stars.

After claiming his father's abandoned ship, young Christopher finds himself prematurely as the new Captain.  His first mate stumbles upon group of orphaned castaways from all over the world who quickly befriend Christopher and join in his quest to find his missing parents by following the clues from the magical Ultimate Treasure Chest.

The quest leads them from 18th century England through the Bermuda Triangle where they pass through an eerie green fog and mysteriously arrive in modern day Peru. The misfit group travels around the beautiful country and talk to the local people, learning about their way of life and the struggles they are facing.  It is their job to not only follow the map but to use their unique talents individually and as a group to help the communities they pass along the way; all the while trying to avoid a relentless band of pirates and a corrupt businessman.

This book had so much potential.  The story idea was fun and interesting.  There was plenty of action and adventure.  It was a unique twist on Time travel, taking the characters from the past to the present instead of to the past or some fictitious future.  The author shared her knowledge of geology, history, and geography throughout the story and developed some great teaching moments.  It even had a feel of a virtual vacation to amazing landmarks in the country.  My biggest issue with the story, is the delivery. 

Some of the teaching moments felt forced and not an essential part of the story.  The rhymes in the clues seemed to spell out exactly what the author wanted the reader to learn instead of letting them naturally find the answer through the reading.  I found some of the description lacking and was confused as to who the target audience was supposed to be.  There is a wide array of character ages and the content of the story seems somewhat advanced yet it is written very simply with very stereotypical dialogue. I felt that the story could have been more fully developed and been an excellent read.  I can usually dive right into a book with themes like this one and fly right through it, but I had a hard time staying focused while I was reading. I started reading this book out loud to my two boys (8 & 10), but they lost interest after the first few chapters and I finished reading it on my own. 

I learned a lot about the ecological and environmental issues facing Peru, and I have a renewed appreciation for the rain forest and the industrial issues that affect not only the flora and fauna of the beautiful country but the people and communities who call it their home.  I also learned more about gemstones than I had ever had an interest in doing before.  Using the gem coins as power sources was an interesting way to tie in yet another educational factor to the story.

I think this book would be successful in a group/educational setting. As a stand alone free time or bedtime reader, it is not something I will read again.

*I received a copy of this book for free, but the opinions and comments I expressed are my own.

Leo Superhero: Book Review

As a Tomoson Blogger, I get the opportunity to read and review books for FREE!
This book quickly caught my attention and I looked forward to reading Leo Superhero.

I rated this book 4 out of 5 stars.

All little kids love to use their imagination and what little boy doesn't want to be a superhero? This cute little story tells of a Sunday morning adventure of one such superhero with his sidekick milkshake the cat.  As Leo goes on an early morning mission donned in his homemade superhero suit, he has to have patience, share, and show his love for others before he can get back in bed before the family wakes up.

The pictures in this book are so fun! They are bright and colorful and told as much of the story as the words. It was the fabulous pictures that helped me decide to give this book 4 instead of 3 stars.

The story is simple enough to keep young readers and listeners entertained throughout the entire story, however older readers may loose interest.

I love that this book was written by authors with children who wanted to write books for them that would be a good learning experience.  This book will leave your child feeling good and ready to be a helper.

Granny-Guru: Can I Just Take a Nap?

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Can I Just Take a Nap?

Readers know the classic book for reading your grandchildren to sleep, “Goodnight, Moon.” A new classic has been introduced, “Can I Just Take a Nap?”

A bowl of Cheerios (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ron Rauss, architect, poet and first-time children’s book author, decided to enter a contest in 2010 that Cheerios hosts every year for new children’s book authors. He won, beating out more than 8,000 entries.

Simon and Schuster published his book and General Mills, owner of Cheerios cereal, put a small, paperback version in three million boxes of Cheerios. Now, it’s out in hardback. Although Rauss is also an illustrator, his publisher chose Rob Shepperson to illustrate this book.

This is the sweet story of a sleepy little boy who wanders all over trying to find a quiet place where he can take a nap. Author Rauss says it was really a story about how tired he was as a new, stay-at-home Dad.

New parents and grandparents, unused to the early rise and unbounded energy of children and grandchildren, can relate. But, grandparents also know that one of the ways to get a tired grandchild down for a nap or down for the night is to have a soothing ritual, like reading to them in bed, or just before you take them to bed.

The child in this book, Aiden, was named after Rauss’s own, now four-year-old son. A book soon to follow will feature Rauss’s 18-month-old son, Jaxon.

Order the book from amazon for your own new sleepytime tradition by clicking on the title, “Can I Just Take a Nap?”

 Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

Granny-Guru: Mary Poppins

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I remember watching the Disney movie, “Mary Poppins” when it first came out. It was released August 27, 1964, the summer before my Senior year of high school.

I had never read the original 1933 book on which the movie is based, and, after watching the movie, it never occurred to me to read the book.

That changed when I recently saw the movie, “Saving Mr. Banks.”

This new movie is the story of how Disney came to make the “Mary Poppins”movie. He negotiated with the book’s author, an Australian who had moved to London, P. L. Travers (a pen name for  Helen Lyndon Goff). She was the child of an alcoholic father who died of influenza when she was eight.

Though the negotiations ended in Disney getting the rights to the movie, they were so contentious that he did not invite Travers to the opening and she never allowed him to make another movie from any of her seven other Mary Poppins books. If you stay through the credits at the end of the movie, you will hear a tape recording of negotiations between Travers and the writers and song-writers Disney put on the project.

Travers died in 1996, at the age of 96. She never married. Her only child was a boy she adopted from his grandparents, who were raising seven grandchildren.

So, how did this child, bereft of her adoring father as a youngster, come to write the fanciful “Mary Poppins?” After watching "Saving Mr. Banks," I had to go back and read the original Mary Poppins book.

The movie is largely very faithful to the book. Mary Poppins, a nanny, blows in on the East Wind, right when Mrs. Banks’ nanny has unexpectedly quit.

It is interesting to me that a modest family with four children, the father a mid-level bank manager, can afford a staff of four for the household. Mrs. Banks is a stay-at-home Mom only in the sense that she doesn't work. Perhaps it is as they tell us. Nearly one hundred years later, we live in an age of labor-saving devices that make up for staff.

But, historical context aside, the book’s delight comes from its whimsy.

• What do animals do at night in a zoo, when all the people have gone home? What if some people get locked into the zoo at night?
• What is an appropriate birthday gift for a snake to give a close friend? What does a nanny give her friend, one of the stars, for her birthday?
• If you had fingertips that could be any flavor you wanted, what flavor would you choose?
• Wouldn't you like to slide up a banister sometimes, instead of always down?

Though Mary Poppins brooked no nonsense from her charges, she introduced them to a fantastical world that kept them out of trouble and made her sudden departure on the next wind, as she had predicted, sadder but richer for her having been in their lives.

After seeing the movie, “Saving Mr. Banks,” you will want to read the original "Mary Poppins" book yourself and introduce your grandchildren to this classic.

Then, you will want to reward your own inner child and watch the Disney movie, “Mary Poppins,” all over again,

I can hear you already singing, “Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down…”

Order yourself a weekend of "Mary Poppins" with the grandchildren.

Click on the title here or the image below to order from amazon, "Mary Poppins" the classic book, "Mary Poppins" the Disney movie, or "Saving Mr. Banks," the movie about making "Mary Poppins" which is still in theaters but can be pre-ordered.

Mary Poppins, the classic book
 

Mary Poppins, the  Disney movie

Saving Mr. Banks, the movie about the making of Mary Poppins movie

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

*Image Credit:  https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse455/12au/projects/project1/students/adevore3/artifact/mary_poppins.jpg

http://www.disneydreamer.com/MarryPoppins-wr.jpg
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Granny-Guru: Million, Billions, & Trillions

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Millions, Billions & Trillions

When former math teacher, David Adler, started writing math storybooks for children, he set out to explain big concepts.  Shapes, word problems, fractions, algebra and Roman numerals.

In his brand-new, 2013 book, “Millions, Billions & Trillions,” he tackles big numbers.

Parents and teachers may care that it “meets the Common Core State Standards for fourth-grade mathematics in Number and Operations in Base Ten.” Grandparents will delight in its whimsical illustrations and real-world-based representation of how much a million, or billion, or trillion means, after you find out how many zeros there are in the number.

He looks at big numbers by comparing them to things around us:

• How many pizzas can you buy with one million dollars?
• How many people would it take to have one billion strands of hair?
• How high is a stack of one trillion dollar bills?

He looks at big numbers by comparing them to time:

How long does it take to count to one million? To one billion?

He looks at big numbers by comparing them to each other:

How many millions of people are in New York? In California? In the U.S.?

For your grandchildren to get a feel for big numbers, before they learn the abstraction in school, introduce them, gently, with fun and imagination, with Adler’s “Millions, Billions & Trillions: Understanding Big Numbers.”

You can order Adler’s book from amazon by clicking on the title above or the book cover below.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru
Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers"

http://newgrandmas.com

Granny Guru: Grandma's Button Box Book

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Grandma's Button Box

This is a story about a girl who spills all the buttons in Grandma’s button box while Grandma is out taking her morning walk. She loves Grandma’s button box because Grandma tells a story about each button.

Spanish metal button circa 1650-1675, 12mm diameter. (Photo credit: Wikipedi

There are buttons from Grandma’s wedding dress, her own baby sweater. Lost buttons that turned up in the doghouse, the fishbowl, the gerbil’s cage. Buttons from everyone in the family – Grandpa’s suspenders, her brother’s tuba recital.

She and her brother and sister looked all over to find all the buttons that had spilled. And, then came the sorting. They had to try to remember if Grandma sorted them by color, shape or size, and match the number of compartments in the button box.

Join in their adventure to find out what they figured out.

Grandma’s Button Box is part of the Math Matters series published by Kane Press, a publisher founded by Joanne Kane, a former teacher and developer of reading and math materials for the classroom.

Not only are their books designed to be read to children or read independently by children, but, they include additional activities in the back to enjoy with your grandchildren, in this case emphasizing sorting by color, shape and size.

Order your own copy of this book from amazon by clicking on the title, “Grandma’s Button Box,” and share this sweet math adventure with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

Granny-Guru: Bedtime Math. Modern Children's Book

I am happy to introduce a new Contributor to A Handful of Everything! Miss Carol Covin aka the Granny Guru! She has a fabulous blog http://newgrandmas.com.  Check it out for some great posts from her 4 fold mission: To inspire grandparents to write their autobiographies, highlight inspirational cancer survivor stories, to show how parenting has changed, and to describe fun activities to enjoy with your grandchildren.  And lets face it, kids always love to go to Grandma's house! We can learn a lot from the experts!  So without further ado, please welcome Miss Carol Granny Guru!

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Bedtime Math. Modern Children's Book.

Last summer, my grandson took some of the money he’d earned from cleaning off shelves for me and we went to the bookstore so he could buy a book of his own.

He looked through biographies and fiction, then picked a Math workbook.

This shocked the bookstore clerk, who could barely contain her delight when he put the book up on the counter and brought out his own money.

He asked his grandfather to read the exercises to him while they did the math problems together.

His mother, of course, an accountant, approved when she heard the story.

My granddaughter, similarly, loves math and is good at it. Her parents have taught her to recite the numbers of pi when she has trouble drifting off to sleep.

It is with this backdrop that I ran across a site a few months ago called Bedtime Math.

It seems that Laura Overdeck, an astrophysicist, has been putting her children to bed with math problems, or rather stories with math questions, since they were two.

When I told my son's family about this book, my daughter-in-law, a computer consultant, said that her mother, too, had put her to bed with math stories.

Eventually, other parents began asking Overdeck for her problems. She put together an email and sent it to 10 parents.

Her email list doubled practically overnight and continued to double quickly.

She began to realize she wasn’t the only parent interested in “mathing” her children to sleep as often as reading them to sleep.

Her book, Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late, illustrated by Jim Paillot, was released in 2013.

It is now accompanied by a web site where, not only can you get more math stories and activities, but you can sign up for a daily activity to be sent to you.

Her format is approachable, slipping math in quietly after explaining something in the real world.

And, by giving three levels of difficulty of the activities, it allows children to find their own level.

Here’s an excerpt of one:

“Totally Squashed”

“A large cucumber or a bag of potatoes can get really heavy.”

“That’s because veggies are made mostly of water, and water itself is pretty heavy.”

“Wee ones: if you have 4 giant squash and 5 giant pumpkins, how many enormous vegetables do you have?”

“Little kids: If each giant pumpkin weighs 1,000 pounds and your car weighs 4,500 pounds, how many whole pumpkins do you need to outweigh your car?”

“Big kids: What weighs more, 4 of your 900-pound pumpkins or 5 of your 700-pound zucchinis?”

Overdeck hides the answers on each page and lays out the math equation it takes to solve the problem in an answer sheet at the end of the book for parents and grandparents.

If your grandchildren are like Overdeck’s children, they’ll be asking for their bedtime math every night along with their bedtime stories.

You can start off with the book from amazon, by clicking on the title, Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late.

Or, sign up for Overdeck's daily math post at http://bedtimemath.org to get started today.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”