Grade: 2

A trip to the market is how most bakers buy the ingredients for an apple pie, but not in this book. Readers will take a delicious trip around the world to gather the finest foods. First, your students will board a steamship to Europe to gather Italian semolina and elegant French eggs. Then they’ll coast to Sri Lanka and trek deep into the rain forest for cinnamon. After hitching a ride back to England for milk, they’ll dock in Jamaica for sugarcane and parachute into a Vermont orchard to pick apples. At last they’ll head home to combine the ingredients! This how-to adventure includes a recipe for apple pie and a mouth-watering ending!

Newbery-winning author Jean Craighead George demonstrates how to communicate with finicky felines. “Among cats, ‘Hello’ is rubbing heads,” writes George who has authored more than 80 books on animals and nature. If students feel more connected to canines, try George’s How to Talk to Your Dog (HarperCollins, 2000).

Solla Sollew is a tale of a young person who discovers the “troubles” of life and wishes to escape them. Through a series of adventures experienced when trying to reach the mythical city of the title (”where they never have troubles/at least very few”) the protagonist comes to realize that he must face his problems instead of running away from them. (At the end of the book, it is revealed that the mythical city has just one problem: a creature given to slapping keys out of keyholes has taken up residence in the gate to the city, and it is considered extremely bad luck to kill this kind of creature. As a result, nobody can get into the city. In fact, the mayor moves to another city called Boola Boom-Ball, “where they never have troubles/no troubles at all.”) It features typical fantastic occurrences, as well as some mild political statements. In one instance, the protagonist is forced to pull a wagon for a bossy would-be helper. In another scene, he is drafted into the army under the command of the fearsome, but ultimately cowardly, tyrant General Genghis Khan Schmitz.

Best friends, Turtle and Spottie spend all their time together. They go to the gym, plant a garden, and enjoy scary movies. But they don’t always think alike, so compromise is the solution. Divided into chapters, this storybook can be read aloud at one time or over several occasions.

Rhythm, rhyme, and humor add zest to this tale of a young naturalist who sets out in search of frogs. As he explores the bay, he never finds a single frog, but delights in other animals. Alert readers will not only spy the heron, turtle, dragonfly, and other creatures the boy describes, but also the playful frogs that elude him.

A crocodile with an attitude, whose greatest joy is overeating, is taken from Egypt to Paris as a souvenir for Napoleon. Marcellino’s paintings fill each page with colorful images. Read it aloud!

Behind Mr. Sneelock’s ramshackle store, there’s an empty lot. Little Morris McGurk is convinced that if he could just clear out the rusty cans, the dead tree, and the old cars, he would have nothing to stop him from using the lot for the amazing, the world-beating, Circus McGurkus. The more elaborate Morris’ dreams about the circus become, the more they depend on sleepy-looking, innocent Mr. Sneelock, who stands outside his ramshackle store sucking on a pipe, oblivious to the fate that awaits him in the depths of Morris’s imagination. He doesn’t yet know that he’ll have to dispense 500 gallons of lemonade, be lassoed by a Wily Walloo, wrestle a Grizzly-Ghastly, and ski down a slope dotted with giant cacti. But if his performance is up to McGurkian expectations, then “why, ladies and gentlemen, youngsters and oldsters, your heads will quite likely spin right off your shouldsters!”

In the book, Gerald McGrew is a kid who, when visiting a zoo, finds that the exotic animals are “not good enough”. He says that if he ran the zoo, he would let all of the current animals free and find new, more bizarre and exotic ones. Throughout the book he lists these creatures, starting with a lion with ten feet and escalating to more imaginative (and imaginary) creatures, such as the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, “the world’s biggest bird from the island of Gwark, who eats only pine trees, and spits out the bark.” The illustrations also grow wilder as McGrew imagines going to increasingly remote and exotic habitats and capturing each fanciful creature, and brings them all back to a zoo now filled with his wild new animals. He also imagines the praise he receives from others, who are amazed at his “new Zoo, McGrew Zoo”.