Grade: 1

Harold’s wonderful purple crayon makes everthing he draws become real. One evening, Harold draws a path and a moon and goes for a walk-and the moon comes too. After many adventures, Harold gets tired and can’t find his bedroom. Finally, he remembers that the moon always shines through his bedroom window. He draws himself a bed, and “the purple crayon dropped on the floor, and Harold dropped off to sleep.” This little gem is filled with visual and written puns.

The intrepid Jack and Annie are summoned once again to the fantasy realm of Camelot. There, Merlin the Magician tells them that the Stone of Destiny has been stolen. The answer to its disappearance lies within a haunted castle. With a young magician named Teddy, Jack and Annie take on the challenge in an adventure that takes them to new heights and places they couldn’t even imagine!

My name is Bumblebee Bat. I may be small, but I’m a great flyer. I live in a secret cave with my brothers and sisters. Want to know more? Then open this book and fly with Bumblebee Bat into the night. A series of questions and answers introduce children to the life and habitat of the exotic and endangered Bumblebee Bat. Scientifcally accurate illustration make these exotic animals accessible to young readers. Back matter includes additional child-friendly facts.

Inspired by a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, this story follows two bear friends who take different “routes” to get to the town of Fitchburg. Henry decides to walk, while his friend plans to work to earn the train fare. Each turn of the page offers a look at two different ways to reach the same goal. This book also includes information on Thoreau, his writings, and his literary friends, such as Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose names are used as characters.

Henry Brown doesn’t know how old he is. Nobody keeps records of slaves’ birthdays. All the time he dreams about freedom, but that dream seems farther away than ever when he is torn from his family and put to work in a warehouse. When Henry grows up and marries, he is again devastated when his family is sold at the slave market. Then one day, as he lifts a crate at the warehouse, he knows exactly what he must do: He will mail himself to the North. After an arduous journey in the crate, Henry finally has a birthday — his first day of freedom.

Wodney Wat, a shy rodent, is teased by his classmates because he can’t pronounce R’s. Wodney, however, transforms into a hero when he saves his classmates from the mean bully, Camilla Capybara, by outwitting her in a game of Simon Says. Munsinger’s drawings add to the humor. This book is sure to make kids laugh out loud and reassure those that feel like outsiders that their day will come!

Back in 1957, Theodor Geisel responded to an article in Life magazine that lamented the use of boring reading primers in schools. Using the pseudonym of “Dr. Seuss” (Seuss was Geisel’s middle name) and only two hundred twenty-three words, Geisel created a replacement for those dull primers: “The Cat in the Hat.” The instant success of the book prompted Geisel and his wife to found Beginner Books, and Geisel wrote many popular books in this series, including “Hop on Pop,” “Fox in Socks,” and “Green Eggs and Ham.” Other favorite titles in this series are “Go, Dog, Go!” and “Are You My Mother?” by P. D. Eastman, “A Fly Went By,” by Mike McClintock, and “Put Me in the Zoo,” by Robert Lopshire. These affordable hardcover books combine large print, easy vocabulary, and large, bright illustrations in stories kids will want to read again and again.

Poor Horton. Dr. Seuss’s kindly elephant is persuaded to sit on an egg while its mother, the good-for-nothing bird lazy Maysie, takes a break. Little does Horton know that Maysie is setting off for a permanent vacation in Palm Springs. He waits, and waits, never leaving his precarious branch, even through a freezing winter and a spring that’s punctuated by the insults of his friends. (”They taunted. They teased him. They yelled ‘How Absurd! Old Horton the Elephant thinks he’s a bird!’”) Further indignities await, but Horton has the patience of Job–from whose story this one clearly derives–and he is rewarded in the end by the surprise birth of… an elephant-bird. Horton Hatches the Egg contains some of Theodor Geisel’s most inspired verse and some of his best-ever illustrations, the dated style of which only accentuates their power and charm. A book no childhood should be without. — Richard Farr