Indie animator and composer Cyriak has finally made something I can show my five-year-old without supplying her with a decade's worth of nightmare material. The video about teddy bears is engaging, richly patterned, and laugh-out-loud funny. Enjoy it with a child!


For an example of a Cyriak piece with dozens of ingenious jokes (and plenty of mildly amusing ones), try his entertaining "Animation Mix." If you start watching it and think it would be ok for your young child to enjoy with you, don't be fooled. Things get ugly and, for young viewers, very creepy.

Here's an interview with Cyriak that gives a few hints of his creative process. It contains a bit of the artist's gore but nothing likely to really scare a kid. But that's just my assessment.


- Jeremiah

Microsoft's new gaming interface, dubbed Project Natal, takes the concept of Nintendo's Wii (much loved in our household) a step further by eliminating the controller altogether and enabling the interface to track 11 different points on the player's body. It's pretty incredible, as you can see:



Not sure about a game designed simply to have you flailing, but the potential for this interface is pretty exciting. - Jeremiah

Our first three recent-release book picks are ranked from our favorite downward, and then we have an "oldie but goodie" for you.

Fiona the Flower Girl

by Carley Roney and the editors of the knot

Eight-year-old Fiona is going to be the flower girl at her aunt Caroline's wedding. This book begins with her aunt's engagement ("Fiona thought it would be much better to have a ring that was purple, but she could tell that Aunt Caroline was very happy with her clear ring."), then goes on to dress shopping, the bridal shower, the rehearsal, the all-important walk down the aisle, and the reception.

This is an excellent book for flower girls-to-be. It explains wedding lingo and a flower girl's role simply, while still functioning more as a fun story than as an instructional manual. There is, however, a guide for parents at the end that reads more like a good magazine article, suggesting flower girl etiquette and traditions. The illustrations are charming, with girly patterned backgrounds and accents. The book includes a little purple flower necklace on a ribbon to match the one Fiona receives from her aunt.

Holy cow, it's on sale on Amazon, down from $16 to about $6.50!

Little Chick

by Amy Hest, illustrated by Anita Jeram

Little Chick is a sweet book made up of three similar mini-stories. In the first, Little Chick is waiting for a carrot to grow - but "Old-Auntie" says that sometimes a small carrot is just what you need, so the chick pulls it. In the second, she's waiting for her kite to fly. Old-Auntie comes along and walks with her, and eventually, the kite catches the wind. In the third, she wants to pluck a star from the sky, but Old-Auntie says the star makes the sky sparkle, so she leaves it there.

I was waiting for more with each of the stories. Little Chick is a cute character, and appropriately preschooler-ish in personality (a little impatient, exuberant, adventurous), but the stories lacked punch. I twice wondered if I had accidentally skipped a page, or if they really did just end like that. The storylines are very simple, and to me, a little boring. I was also put off by the name "Old-Auntie." I imagined my aunt getting indignant if Sarina were to nickname her that.

The illustrations are watercolor and pencil, with large gray text.

My daughter asked me to read the story to her twice, and then never again. I think she was a little bored by its repetitiveness, too. But if you have a particularly gentle child, this might be just right.

On sale in hardback, down from about $17 to just over $12.

Dinosaurs Roar, Butterflies Soar!

by Bob Barner

The illustrations in Dinosaurs Roar, Butterflies Soar! are superb; made with cut paper and pastels, they're simple and bright and friendly. That's where my nice review ends.

The text is dry and tries to cover too much. The top half of each layout is supposed to be the simple storyline, while the bottom gives more in-depth facts and bits of trivia. This in itself was confusing, because if I read both, it broke up the storyline and I’d forget where we were by the next page. It didn't matter much, though, because the storyline felt like a school lecture. What a wasted opportunity to give the (worthwhile) lessons some real life by making it a personal story that kids can relate to.

While the recommended audience here is from 4-8, I'd suggest it's for ages 6 and up... if you happen to have a kid who's really into not just the "fun" aspect of dinosaurs, but the historical aspect.

$13-$14 on Amazon.com.

Oldie But Goodie: Honey Bunny Funnybunny

by Marilyn Sadler

Honey Bunny Funnybunny is one of the Cat in the Hat Beginner Books for early readers, and it's a good pick for kids who are dealing with sibling squabbles. In this book, Honey Bunny has an older brother, P.J., who loves to drive her crazy. He pulls the covers off her bed, ties knots in her sleeves, switches the colors her paint jars, and even switches the heads on her dolls.

Finally, their dad yells at P.J., and he stops teasing his sister. For a while, she's happy - "but after a while, she began to feel that something was missing." P.J. is out playing with his friends now, and he's ignoring her entirely. She realizes she actually misses his teasing, and is afraid that he doesn't love her anymore. But when she wakes up one morning and discovers that he's painted her face with polka dots while she slept, she's elated. "P.J. loves me!" she cries. A cute take on quirky sibling relationships.

A mere $9 on Amazon.com, and if you like that, there's a whole series of these books.

Jenna Glatzer (www.jennaglatzer.com) is the author of 19 books. Her most recent collaboration is Unthinkable with Scott Rigsby, the first double-amputee to finish the world-famous Hawaiian Ironman triathlon. Jenna lives with her two-year-old daughter in New York. - Jeremiah

There's no better way to introduce preschoolers to Kant's moral imperative than Jo Ann Stover's If Everybody Did, an entertaining romp through the consequences of every person in the room engaging in the same minor misbehaviors after one child does a demo round. We have a love/hate relationship with morally instructive children's books, but we are learning over time that what makes them work well in our household is humor. From Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? to Maurice Sendak and Sesyle Johnson's What Do You Say, Dear?, the use of humor puts everyone at ease while gently introducing real concepts that need teaching - in this case, helping kids conceive of the consequences of what would happen "if everybody did" what it is convenient or entertaining for them to do in isolation.

Some of the issues covered in the book might feel a little constraining for families with relaxed standards of physical behavior - it covers such issues as rough play, "changing your seat," and slamming doors - but the words are few and the illustrations are pretty hilarious if you ask Z and I, so it's easy to focus the "lesson" on the standards you actually care about enforcing. Consequences include doors falling off and crushing everyone, a sea of unseated children chaotically shifting positions around a room, and (for the action shown above) a pile of people laying like pancakes while the last of a dozen or so people gleefully leaps towards the dogpile.

Proof that this book is serving us well was close at hand recently. Jenni was sick with a cold and dropping used tissues on the floor (there was no trash can handy) and Z waltzed up and "corrected" her. "Mama, what would happen if EVERYBODY did that?"


Personally, this one cracks me up - Stover has an eye for details. The kid with his hands in his mouth makes me laugh every time.

You can pick up If Everybody Did on Amazon.com for about eight bucks. - Jeremiah

Inspired by Disney anthropomorphism, Czech animator Zdenek Miler invented Krtek the mole in 1956 to star in a short animated film to educate children on the processing of flax seed. In 1963 he began producing new cartoons based on the character, but instead of narraion elected to use his young daughters act as voice actors, providing non-verbal exclamations but no spoken words.

There is something very slow and deliberate about the cartoons in this series that make it feel at once primitive and perhaps a little slow for today's kids but make the stories' jokes that much funnier. Here are a couple of good episodes, which you'll find with translated titles from every eastern European country as well as in English. Like the Smurfs, Barbapapa, and Moomin, Krtek has become an international icon of only transitional importance in the U.S.

I liked this first episode a lot because Z and I have been working pretty hard on learning to read notes on a staff as part of her violin practice. Be patient with the pacing and you and your child will be delighted by it.



Mole's most frequent companions are the mouse and rabbit shown in the episode below. Their near-constant presence makes what happens at about 3:40 in the video you are about to see truly shocking. I find the music that accompanies this tragic turn of events hilarious. It is about as desperate a tenor as this slow-moving action can achieve.



- Jeremiah

Toon Books - the series that redefines "comics" for young children and makes them an invaluable early reading tool - introduced us to some surprisingly versatile online comic panel creation software that your kids will enjoy playing with.

After fooling around with it, I wrote:

In fact, it works so well, they should take it further. Add the ability to sequence multiple panels on a page and to draw your own characters with a rudimentarly drawing tool, and they could either sell this software on a standalone basis or provide exclusive access to purchasers of their books through an access code.

Then I started browsing some more and realized that Comics Lab Extreme, a companion product to the Comics Lab that Toon Books had brought me to, does just that. Multipage comic books, artwork upload, and more. Great stuff for tech-savvy kids with an interest in comics. And it's all free.

Anyone out there have kids who love a particular comics software, online or off? - Jeremiah