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 As a child, did you like to dig up rocks in the backyard? Then you can relate to Julie the Rockhound by Gail Langer Karwoski and illustrated by Lisa Downey. When Julie moves to a new house and finds a piece of quartz crystal buried in the backyard, she turns into “Julie the Rockhound.” Soon her dad dad shows her how to dig for rocks and explains how crystals are formed.

Like other Syvlan Dell Publishing books, Julie the Rockhound comes with a “For Creative Minds” section. (Click here for a PDF version.) Your child will explore if items are plants, animals or minerals. They’ll learn what they need to become a rockhound, how rocks are formed, and how to classify minerals.

The “Food Rocks!” section shows how you can use cooking to understand how rocks are formed. The recipe they give for sedimentary rocks is making a sandwich. The layers of margarine, cheese, bread and meat represent layers of sedimentary rock. Great idea! But why just make a regular sandwich, when you can make a Quadruple-Decker Honolulu Hightower courtesy of the Denver Post and Tucker Shaw.

Quadruple-Decker Honolulu Hightower
Photo by Glenn Asakaw of the Denver Post

If macadamia butter and papaya jam is too weird for your child, try good old peanut butter and grape jelly along with the bananas, and substitute granola for the shredded coconut. You could also experiment with low-fat cream cheese, strawberry preserves, sliced strawberries, and crunchy cereal. A savory idea would be hummus, grated carrots and pepper strips and some baked potato chips for the crunch. Or try cashew butter, apple butter and thin apple slices along with granola, cereal or shredded rice cakes.

Your child could help cut out the bread (try wheat too), spreading the nut butters and jams, and stacking the layers.

Ingredients

1. Five slices white bread, cut into rounds with a cookie cutter (Make sure your slices will fit into a round plastic container as shown here. This sandwich is way too high for plastic wrap or a baggie.)
2. Macadamia butter
3. Papaya jam
4. Pineapple jam
5. A few slices dried banana
6. A few flakes dried coconut (unsweetened)

Directions

1. Spread two rounds bread with macadamia butter. Spread one round with papaya jam. Spread one round with pineapple preserves. Layer banana slices and dried coconut on final round.
2. Stack rounds, starting and finishing with macadamia-butter rounds. Put into container.

When MotherTalk asked me to review Maximum Ride 3: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports a young adult (YA) novel by best-selling author James Patterson, I was thrilled. I love science fiction/fantasy especially when it involves “mutants” like in X-Men or the Hereos televsion show on NBC. And I wanted to bring more YA book reviews to my readers.

At first Patterson did a great job bringing me into the world of Maximum Ride at the beginning of the book. I was especially intrigued that one of the characters, Fang, has a blog. (Always thought the Hermione could have used a wizard’s Internet - WizNet? - and a laptop so she wouldn’t have to carry around all those books.)

Lost, Confused and Angry
Then Patterson lost me, probably because I hadn’t read the first two books, Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment and Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever. What the heck was Itex, The Voice, and Erasers? Then I couldn’t figure out why Max and the Flock (a group of elementary, middle and high school aged flying kids) were flying all over the place while trying to save the world. Patterson wasn’t helping with his one dimensional characters, lack of a sensible plot, and brief teenage romantic interlude either. What a mess!

I began to get angry as I waded through three-page chapters (the 405 page book has 133 chapters - why?), snarky teen dialogue, cliched evil scientists, and cartoon violence where only the bad guys get hurt and die (the good guys get a few boo-boos and quickly recover). Then it occurred to me that Patterson was dumbing down his prose because he was writing for kids. For shame!

Other Great YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books
With so many great YA science fiction/fantasy authors out there like J.K. Rowling, Phillip Pullman, Madeline l’Engle, and Roald Dahl there is no need to waste time with authors who write down to children. It’s a shame that Patterson and his publishers feel that he should in order to get kids to read. Still, the Maximum Ride books are well loved and very popular with the YA market - enough that the series is being made into a movie. I think it’s the “kids save the world” theme that hooks most youngsters.

So, if you find your child reading any of the Maximum Ride books, don’t be alarmed. Just think of them of beginner’s books. Once your child has a taste of YA science fiction/fantasy, introduce them to gems like Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia or Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Once they have a taste of the good stuff, they’ll never go back to “baby books” like Maximum Ride 3.

(Click here for more YA novel reviews.)

Lucie begins her first day of pre-K this afternoon, and is so excited to start! A wonderful book from Random House that captures this feeling is Kindergarten Countdown by Anna Jane Hays and illustrated by Lind Davick.

A little girl named Lucy counts off the days by naming what she’ll do in kindergarten, what she’ll wear, and what she’ll learn. The countdown is a great way to prepare kids for that exciting first day of school (if you have a preschooler or in my case a pre-K’er, then substitute the right grade when you’re reading it out loud).

Not only was I thrilled that the main character had the same name (though spelled differently) as my daughter, the book captured the excitement and all the things she had to look forward to - making friends, playing games, practicing writing, using your manners, and so on.

Activities
This would be a really fun book to use as a countdown to the days leading up to school. You could read Kindergarten Countdown and combine it with a calendar. Assign an activity like “buy school supplies” or “pick out school clothes” to the days before school starts. You could also make time to come up with snack and lunch box menus. Each time you do a countdown to school activity, you could discuss all the exciting things they will be doing, and answer any questions your son or daughter may have.

If your child is apprehensive about his or her first day, having a Kindergarten Countdown activity would be a good way to help them through their fears. You may even want to combine the calendar with a “dry run” by getting up early, getting dressed, getting their backpack ready, and pretending to wait for the school bus, or walking or driving to school. Many schools have open houses before the first official day, and that’s a great opportunity for your child to walk around the school, meet the teachers, and find out where the bathrooms are.

More Bento School Lunch Ideas
Are you tired of bento box lunches yet? I hope not because they’re so fun to look at even if you’d never take time to make them. Check out Laptop Lunches, a website featuring American-style bento boxes designed to help book, The Laptop Lunch User’s Guide: Fresh Ideas for Making Wholesome, Earth-friendly Lunches Your Kids Will Love. (A good pairing with this book is Ann Cooper’s Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.)

Another site to check out is the Lunch in a Box blog. Blogger “Biggie” makes bento boxes for her preschooler, “Bug.” Read her Need for speed: A mommy’s lunch manifesto. I’m very inspired by this wonderful blog, though I’m not sure how much bento box creativity I can get out of PB&J and pudding - the only two things my son Nathan wants to eat for lunch these days.

(And thanks to The Common Room: Recipe Carnival - LUNCH for the bento links and other great lunch ideas.)

For ages 7 to 10 (or older) Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins (and illustrated by Jamie Hogan) is a story of a young girl, Naima, a talented alpana painter. She wants to help earn money for family like her friend Saleem does for his. She soon grows frustrated that girls cannot help this way. After crashing her father’s rickshaw, Naima disguises herself as a boy and apprentices herself as a painter with a woman rickshaw maker.

Rickshaw Girl is a wonderful book for both boys and girls though girls will relate to Naima more. It shows children the value of wanting to help their family, thinking things through, being resourceful, and finding ways to use your talent.

Rickshaw Girl also includes a glossary of Bangla words and an author’s note about how microfinance - small loans to women’s businesses - are changing Bangladesh. The Charlesbridge website has a terrific discussion and activity guide (PDF). The activities include making your own rice paste to paint alpanas and drawing your own alpanas.

You can read an interview with Mitali Perkins at HipWriterMama. Mitali also blogs at Mitali’s Fire Escape (she’s on break and will be back in September).

(Click here for more YA novel reviews.)

Recipes from Bangladesh
India has its own regional cuisine with Bangladesh being no exception. According to Virtual Bangladesh, over 80 percent of the “Indian” restaurants in the U.K. serve Bangladeshi food. I’m guessing it’s probably a similar number in the U.S., so you’ve probably already tried Bangladeshi food without even knowing it. The Virtual Bangladesh website gives recipes for meat dishes like Vindaloo. I was also intrigued by the recipe for Sandeesh, a sweet cheese dessert.

If you’re looking for something “Indian” but a little more Americanized, try Cooking Light’s Chunky Red Dal Soup or Weight Watcher’s Sweet and Sour Slow Cooker Chicken Curry.

I’ve written about bento box lunches before. Japanese moms really go nuts with bento box edible art, and what they come up with is rather intimidating.

So when I came across Gentle Bento (thanks to The Attached Mother) I was relieved. Maybe I could actually try this! I love her examples of Kiddie Bento, too - it looks like something Lucie would come up with, though hers would have more princesses and kitties. (Wonder where she got that Hello Kitty bento box. I’ll have to look for something like it next time we go to the Asian market.)

For more bento box inspiration, check out Jennifer McCann’s book Vegan Lunch Box based on her blog of the same name.