Caps for Sale

Caps for Sale is an awesome book. If you don't own it already, you need to go buy a copy right now. I'll wait here until you get back. Okay, okay, you can read the review first if you really have to. But trust me, this is a great one. I loved it as a child, Charlie loves it now, and I still love it as an adult.

The story of this book is very simple. A peddler sells caps, walking around town with all the caps stacked on top of his head in a huge tower. One day, nobody wants to buy any caps, so he goes for a walk in the countryside and falls asleep under a tree. When he wakes up, he finds that all the caps are missing, except for his own cap. Looking around, he finds that a group of monkeys have taken his caps and escaped up a tree. How will he get them back?

This book has some serious staying power. Charlie is as obsessed with the book at almost-three years old as he was at 18 months. The story is cleverly told, but with lots of repetitive phrases to draw in young children. For example, whenever the book mentions his caps, it talks about "[the peddler's] own checked cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top, a bunch of red caps." There are plenty of opportunities to count the caps and point out their colors.

The best part of the book is the story of how the peddler tries to get his caps back from the monkeys. The illustrations are great -- the peddler in his suit and cap standing at the base of the tree, looking up, and the monkeys hanging from the branches, each wearing one of his caps. The peddler is a little bit angry, but he's pretty sure he can work things out with a simple appeal.

"You monkeys, you," he said, shaking a finger at them, "you give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook their fingers back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

This made the peddler angry, so he shook both hands at them and said, "You monkeys, you! You give me back my caps."
But the monkeys only shook both their hands back at him and said, "Tsz, tsz, tsz."

A few pages later, the peddler is so angry that he's essentially having a temper tantrum, stomping his feet and waving his fists and shouting at the monkeys up in the tree. And the monkeys are still playing their game, imitating everything he does. And then the peddler gives up.

At last he became so angry that he pulled off his own cap, threw it on the ground, and began to walk away.

The monkeys have been copying everything he does up to now, and surprise, surprise, they copy this action, too. They throw the caps to the ground and leave the peddler alone.

So the peddler picked up his caps and put them back on his head--first his own checked cap, then the gray caps, then the brown caps, then the blue caps, then the red caps on the very top.

And slowly, slowly, he walked back to town calling, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!"

I absolutely love the way they show the peddler's temper tantrum progressing bit by bit as he gets angrier. And particularly, how all of his yelling and screaming and shouting doesn't work at all. It's a great lesson for kids (and grownups!) about how not to convince someone to do what you want.

The other thing I really love about this story is the way the mood progresses in a cycle. It's very calm at the beginning, and then it builds up the huge emotional temper tantrum in the middle, and then once the peddler gets his caps back, it returns to the same calm and peaceful tone of the beginning. I've been looking for books to help Charlie deal with his emotions, and I think Caps for Sale gives an excellent model of how to calm back down and accept the good after an emotional outburst.

A note on versions and ages: I bought the board book version of Caps for Sale when Charlie was about 18 months old. He loved it and wanted to read it every day. Unfortunately, we lost the book while we were on vacation a few months later. Eventually I got around to buying a new one, and since Charlie was two and a half by that time, I went for the paperback instead of the board book. It turns out that the board book leaves out some interesting details of the story, but nothing crucial. I would recommend going straight for the paperback. You can buy the paperback alone, or for just an extra two dollars, you can get it packaged together with a CD that narrates the story and adds some songs. In my opinion, the songs are just so-so, but Charlie loves listening to it in the car. This is the first book-CD package I've tried, but I will certainly be doing some more in the future.

Caps for Sale gets my absolute highest recommendation. It's a wonderful story, well-written, with great lessons, and has excellent power to hold a child's interest.

Cat Up a Tree

We found Cat Up a Tree at the library this week, and I like it so much I might buy a copy. Charlie and I have both enjoyed it very much.

At the beginning of the book, an old woman notices a cat stuck in the tree outside her window. Naturally, she calls the fire department to help. But they won't help. "Sorry, we do not catch cats up a tree anymore. Call back if that cat starts playing with matches."

By this time, there are five cats stuck in the tree, so the old woman tries calling the police station. They won't help either. More cats show up. She calls the zoo. They don't catch cats. And so on, and so on, and so on.

This is a fantastic book for a number of reasons. It teaches about different institutions and what services they provide. The old woman calls the fire department, the police, the pet store, the zoo, the post office, the library, and city hall. Each of them says they don't rescue cats up a tree, but mentions something about the job they actually do. Notably, most (but not all!) of these institutions are governmental. If it weren't for the inclusion of the pet store, one could make a nice little lesson about government services versus the free market here. Still, it does provide an opportunity to talk about all of these institutions that are set up for specific helpful purposes, but not for anything you might want them to do for you. And it's quite funny, too, particularly when city hall offers to put up a sign that says "Danger! Look up for Falling Cats."

The book also provides some fun counting practice, and in particular, counting by fives. It starts with one cat, then five, and then adds five more on each page, up to forty. This is quite a lot, compared to most counting books that only go up to ten or twelve. And since they're scattered all over the page, it's a challenge to keep track of which cats you've counted already.

So, what happens in the end? Are the poor cats stuck up the tree forever? Fortunately, no. The old woman gets so frustrated that she throws her phone out the window. But she doesn't unplug it from the wall first! The cats walk across the phone cord into her apartment, safe and sound. Good thing it wasn't a cell phone!

There's a nice little coda at the end, too. The old woman gets a call from city hall (presumably after reeling her phone back in to the house). There are mice everywhere, all over town! Can she help? "Sorry," she tells them. "The cats do not catch mice anymore. Call back if you wish to hear cats purr." I was so pleased that she didn't get altruistic in the end, but refused to help the people who had refused to help her. You might look at this as a sort of modern re-telling of The Little Red Hen, the classic fable in which nobody helps the hen with her planting and harvesting of wheat or baking of bread, so she refuses to share the bread with them in the end. This is a little different, because the old woman didn't actually do any work to rescue the cats herself, but just happened to rescue them by chance. Still, the principle is pretty similar.

We've had tons of fun with this book. It was a great find.

The Midnight Farm

The Midnight Farm is a nearly perfect bedtime story. Once again, I've chosen a book that is out of print, but plenty of used copies are available on Amazon. I've written before about books that create a mood, and this one is an excellent example of the genre. Charlie is usually wide awake when we finish reading his bedtime stories, but this one makes even him a little bit sleepy.

The story is simple and intuitive. A mother gets her son ready for bed by walking around the farm with him, looking at all the animals ready for the night. Some of the animals are settling in to sleep, while others are nocturnal and engaged in their activities.

The book is written in very nice poetry, which contributes to the mood. I'm sure there's a name for this form, but I don't know it -- the first line of each verse is the same as the last line of that verse, with a different beginning. Each verse begins, "Here is the dark of [place]" and it ends, "In the dark of the [place]." Here's one verse to give you a sample:

Here is the dark of the maple tree
Where a raccoon family, one, two, three,
Is making a home in a place that was free
In the dark of the maple tree.

I didn't notice until I was on page five or six of my first reading, but this is also a counting book. After the introductory verse, each page counts up one more animal, to ten. We start with one dog, then two cats, three raccoons, four geese, five horses, etc. This is very subtle, without calling attention to it and without the numbers printed on the pages.

My only complaint about this book is that two of the verses don't rhyme properly. It's very disappointing, since the rest of the book (and the poetry!) is so fantastic, and I wish the author could have fixed this. One verse rhymes stove/glove/love, and another rhymes pond/around/sound. It's annoying, but I'm willing to overlook it because the book is so wonderful in other ways.

The illustrations are also amazing. They are extremely realistic paintings. The people and animals look almost like you could reach out and touch them. The colors are varied, yet muted for evening and bedtime. Just looking at the pictures here is a real treat.

This is a wonderful book for a quiet and peaceful bedtime or naptime story. Charlie sometimes asks for it during the day, too, and then he likes to count the animals and point out the ones that aren't mentioned in the text ("One, two, three raccoons, and an owl!"). I really can't believe this one went out of print.

If You Made a Million

Charlie is way too young for this book. But I'm blogging about it now anyway, even though I haven't shown it to him, because it is such a great find. I am guessing that If You Made a Million is best for the 6-8 age range, but I don't have all that much experience with kids that age, so read the rest of this review and make your own judgment. (NOTE: At the time of this writing, there is something wrong with Amazon's "look inside" feature for this book, such that most of the illustrations are missing.)

This book explains money and various financial transactions in ways that are clear, straightforward, and highly accessible to kids. We work up to the title concept of a million dollars, but we start all the way at the beginning, with a penny.

"CONGRATULATIONS!" the first page announces. "YOU'VE EARNED A PENNY." A little girl is shown feeding a goldfish under a sign that says "Feed the Fish - Earn 1 cent." There's a photograph of a single penny, and the text explains, "It will buy anything that costs one cent." As an example, a boy has set up a stand where he's selling pebbles for one cent each.

When you turn the page, you've earned a nickel. (How, you ask? By dusting a duck, of course.) The book shows a photograph of a nickel and five pennies. It explains "ONE NICKEL is worth the same as FIVE PENNIES." We continue down the page and earn a dime, which we are clearly shown, in the same way, is the same as two nickels or ten pennies. Obvious. Straightforward. Clear. Countable. I particularly like that they mix up the fronts and backs of the coins.

Once we get to a dollar, the book starts to mix things up a bit. After explaining the various low-cost items we could buy with that dollar, the book makes a very different suggestion.

Or perhaps you'd like to save your dollar. You could put it in the bank, and a year from now it will be worth $1.05. The bank wants to use your money and it will pay you five cents to leave your dollar there for a year. The extra five cents is called interest. If you waited ten years, your dollar would earn sixty-four cents in interest just from sitting in the bank. Are you interested in earning lots of interest? Wait twenty years, and one dollar will grow to $2.70.

Dude.

Then we're back to explaining how much $5 is, and $10, and we do another interest calculation with putting $10 in the bank, and on up to $100, and then at long last we earn $1000. We'd like to buy a pet hippo with our $1000, but that's a huge wad of cash.

If you don't like the idea of carrying a thousand dollars around with you, you can put it in the bank and pay for the hippo with a check. The check tells your bank to give $1,000 to the person who sold you the hippo.

To illustrate how this works, the book presents a picture of a check written out for a thousand dollars.

Okay, that's a pretty good explanation. But wait, we're not done! There's a whole two-page explanation of how the process works in detail. You write the check and give it to the person who sold you the hippo, who gives it to his bank, who sends it to a clearinghouse, which tells your bank to take the money out of your account and the other person's bank to put the money into his account. Why did nobody give me this book when I was a kid?

All right. Now we've managed to earn $50,000 and we've decided to use it to buy a castle that's on sale for $100,000. But wait a minute. We don't have $100,000. We only have $50,000. What should we do? Get a mortgage, of course! Fully explained in clear detail.

Finally we earn a million dollars, and we have tons of saving and spending choices. What should we do? Well, the book tells us, it's really all about you and your personal values. What would you like to do? What would you like to have? Where would you like to go?

If you keep your million, you can probably live on the interest without doing any more work for the rest of your life. You might like that, or you could find it rather dull.

Making money means making choices.

So what would you do if you made a million?

Fantastic.

One to Ten and Back Again

We've been working on counting a lot lately, and one of our fun counting books is One to Ten and Back Again. This is a board book with two special gimmicks. First, there are ribbons that are strung through the book, with one new ribbon appearing on each page. Second, each page has text written right-side-up and upside-down. The last page instructs you to turn the book over and read the opposite side. The very minimal story is that insects and other small animals all come to sit on a big flower (one bee, two butterflies, three grasshoppers, etc.), and then when you flip the book over, they all leave, one set at a time.

Both of these gimmicks work really well. The ribbons make a very fun swooshing noise when the pages are turned. The ribbons are actually integral to the book, since the animals you're counting appear on the ribbons.


Turning the book upside-down is very exciting to a toddler. It also allows the book to lead you through counting both up and down without having twice as many pages. The design of the book actually makes it very easy to read without getting confused. In fact, the first time I picked it up in the store, I didn't even realize that it had this upside-down feature! (To be fair, I was distracted by keeping Charlie entertained while I shopped.) All of the text to read is written on the right-hand page for the direction you're holding it, so your eye naturally is drawn there. In addition, the upside-down pages have a black background while the right-side-up ones have a white background. This means that you don't even really notice the black background pages while you're reading it the first way, and then when you turn it upside-down, you are already on alert.

My only complaint here is that the slots in the pages for the ribbons to go through weaken the structural integrity of the pages, so it's easier to bend and crease the pages than in an ordinary board book. So far, the creases haven't prevented the pages from turning properly, though.

The illustrations are pretty cute, too. The black and white background serves to highlight the brightly colored flower and insects. As the creatures pile on to the flower, it starts to bend over, ending up pretty smushed by page 10. Then as you count back down to 1 in the upside-down part, the flower gradually stands back up. There's also a little preview on each right-side-up page--the bottom right corner lets you know which animal is coming next.

Oh, and perhaps this counts as a third gimmick--there's a cutout running all the way through one side of the book that serves as a handle. Even a very little kid can hold this book easily in one hand, making it very portable for restaurants or waiting rooms.