Start Your Engines!

Cover reproduced with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Curious George Takes a Train, Farmer Dale's Red Pickup Truck, Katy and the Big Snow--these are great company for Sheep in a Jeep in the recently-released collection Start Your Engines: 5-Minute Stories. The stories range from a realistic portrait to zany fantasies, and features lots of rhythmic language (plus truck jokes). If trucks, trains, and construction gear rev your kids up, treat them to this book. The sheep are tickled to hang out with monster trucks and train-riding dinosaurs--though based on their previous driving performance, someone should probably hide the keys from my flock.

The Winter of Our Discontent

...is about to be over, after a record-breaking number of days with below-zero temps, and head-high heaps of snow.

Frozen in place by solidified slush,
pelted by snow and the harsh polar vortex,
can a muse come awake from a hibernal hush,
and thaw out a verse from a half-gelid cortex?

It's time for March Madness in the poetry tournament at thinkkidthink.