Tale of Despereaux

The Tale of Despereaux movie is out tomorrow!

Guess what I'm going to ask? Yes, that's right. What are we going to recommend? For books or for movies? Post your ideas!

We link to games on the movie site from the Treehouse and have a nice If You Like list there.

Monica Edinger at Educating Alice talks about seeing the movie and Alison Morris at PW talks about it too. (Thanks Fuse #8 for the links.)

This title is still a big favorite with classroom teachers and an easy one to recommend when a child has to read off the Newbery Medal list for school. If you haven't read it yet, now's a great time to get caught up.

If you have read it--how is it holding up for you? Did you like it when you read it? Do you like it now? What do you think? Does it still feel like a Newbery? Is anybody planning on seeing it?

I read it when it won, but now I just have foggy impressions of a dining hall, dungeon, and authorial asides. Guess it's time to read it again!

Twilight

It's here! Twilight, the movie, was released today.

For those of you who have been living on Mars this year, Stephanie Meyer's vampire series has been THE hot read. What are we going to recommend to tweens and teens who have A) read all the books and B) seen the movie 20 times already and C) want something just like it?

Leave us a comment with some movies or books that you are going to recommend!

In One Ear

Working with kids means we need to be able to help them find more than just books. We need to be Media Advisors, too. To that end, I'd like to ask everyone to listen to one children's music CD this month. Stick it in your car's CD player for a few days, or listen to it while you do the dishes, but listen to the whole thing, then tell us about it. How does it compare to the music you loved when you were a kid, or to the music your kids listened to when they were small? How would you recommend it in one or two sentences to a child or their family?

Need some help choosing? Here's a few sites I gathered up. Where do you go for music recommendations?

Zooglobble
Kids' Music That Rocks
NPR's "The Year In Music for Kids 2007"

Try a search in Tales' Treehouse for "Children's Music" and explore what's available, including this article.

Also, I ran across this cool Music Blog from the Kalamazoo Public Library. It includes reviews of children's music, and has links into their kids' music collection.