James Young (1) (1956–)

It starts out much like The Cat in the Hat: brother and sister stuck inside on a rainy day with nothing to do - so they go up into the attic and look into Uncle Ned's trunk, which contains only a scrap of paper. It's not a treasure map, but a recipe for alligator cookies. A real alligator dissuades them by presenting another recipe instead (peanut butter and cornflakes, mostly). Rhyming text ("And when you make them, you don't have to beat them. You don't have to bake them. You just have to eat them").

This is one I remembered from my childhood and hunted down to share with the toddler. She likes it a lot too!… (meer)

I came across A Million Chameleons by chance but was taken with the entertaining way it introduces color identification to young children. The flock of Chameleons journeys together to the zoo, a merry go round and even the skating rink, all the while changing color on each page, which allows for the fun experience of participatory guessing. Young’s illustrations and rhyming narration are both playful and exciting enough for many repeated reads.

When teaching early childhood art lessons, I love to emphasize that there are many different shades of each color and this book does a great job of showing a range of blues, reds and pinks. I also love that it makes the process of learning color easy and fun as the characters are lively and dancing all over the pages while the child gets to guess what color they will change next. It even concludes by introducing the idea of multicolored as the million chameleons change every color hue at the same time! Additionally, this book provides a great example of the wondrous range of colors found in our natural world, sometimes even in one magical creature such as the chameleon.… (meer)

The story begins with one lonely puppy, then two, and three, four, then five, and the book finally ends with ten cute little puppies. The book is an emergent reader book but the book can be ideal when students are learning to count to ten as well as for a tool the teacher can use when teaching rhyming words. Some examples of adding in the book are, "Two friendly puppies in the snow, so far from home, so far to go! Only the owl in her hollow tree saw them go by--and then there were three". The number appears on the following page, giving the students time to say the number aloud with the teacher. The book goes on and on with rhyming words and a growing number of puppies.… (meer)