HOME |
RSS | 
Garden Plate | $14.95
Do you have a fussy eater on your hands? Make meals fun again with the Garden Plate from the NeatoShop! This fabulous plate comes complete with ramps and breaks to separate food into groupings. And it’s decorated with tiny garden plants! It is specially designed to work with the Garden Utensil Set (sold separately). Dishwasher and microwave safe. Playing with your food just got a whole lot more fun! The Garden Plate is part of a wide selection of mealtime fun products in the NeatoShop.
Comments Off
You probably already know that China has a one child per couple policy, but you might not know how it is enforced or who is granted exceptions to the rule. The answers to these questions can be found over at Mental Floss and they are simply fascinating.
Provincial governments are responsible for enforcing the policy and do so through a mix of rewards and punishments doled out by local officials. In most provinces, having a an extra child gets you a fine, the amount of which varies across provinces. In some places, the fine is a set amount (usually in the thousands of dollars), and in others it’s based on a percentage of the violator’s annual income. In some provinces, policy violators can also have their property and/or belongings confiscated and lose their jobs.
Who knew they even can fire you from your job for having an extra baby?
In English, that’s Who’s Coming? which was a kinderbuch (children’s book) from 1910 showing all kinds of people who come to the house. The illustrations are by Julie Conz, and you can see eleven of them at BibliOdyssey. Not only are they beautiful, but they also highlight how differently goods and services were provided 100 years ago. Link
What do Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein have in common? Yes, they all wrote bestselling children’s stories and they all have new books coming out soon, but the secret to their success is that their writing was once considered inappropriate for children!
Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.
Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”
Read more about it at the New York Times. Link -via @Marilyn_Res
Sure Fraggle Rock, The Smurfs and most other kid’s shows are a little strange, but these are nothing compared to the Teletubbies. If you really want to know just how bizarre children’s programming can get though, just take a look at these strange shows that make the Teletubbies look like a study in logical thought.
If you love American television programming, but wish you could use it to teach your children the perils of the evil Western fascist dogs, then Tomorrow’s Pioneers might just be your new favorite kids show. The show features a female host and a few costumed characters, including a knock-off Mickey Mouse character, entertaining children with ideas of antisemitism, anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism. As if that weren’t enough, many of the costumed characters are martyred, most notably, the Mickey Mouse character is killed by an Israeli interrogator, providing youngsters with a deep, long-standing hatred for Palestine’s sworn enemies. Nothing like getting your propaganda into your kid’s minds before they’re too old to think for themselves.
If you thought the Teletubbies were strange, just wait until you get a load of this show that their creator released after it. According to their website, the Boohbahs are “five magical atoms of power” who live in a Boohball, which is a glowing white ball that can travel from country to country whenever a child calls it. The Boohball features a spinning recharging pod where the Boohbahs can recharge their energy through the laughter of children they play with. Since this show was made for kids between the ages of three and five, I’m going to go ahead and say this show is actually just supposed to entertain kids with bright colors and weird effects –just like the Teletubbies, since all of that background story is way beyond the scope of any kids in their demographic.
more …
Costume designer Heather MacCrimmon made dresses designed by three little girls “too young to be influenced by commercial fashion.” What resulted is three outfits that any 7-year-old girl would be proud to wear. Link -via Metafilter
Illustrator Andrew Kolb was listening to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” when he realized the imagery would make a great children’s book. Well, you know – if your kids are ready to deal with the tragedy of an astronaut dying alone in space. The book isn’t available in hard copy (yet), but you can get the PDF for free.
Link via Laughing Squid
If you want to make an attention-grabbing ad, you have to do something really outrageous these days. That being said, these 10 ads on Oddee -all featuring kids- are utterly disturbing.
Do you or someone you know have an addiction to Warcrack? Are you spending so much time farming and battling monsters that your life is passing you by? Well, at least you haven’t sold your kids to pay for your MMO habits! One couple in China, however, have sold three of their children just to pay for their online gaming obsession, and they see nothing wrong with what they have done. They are so honest, in fact, that they admit to not wanting to raise the children, and that their intention from day one was to have children in order to sell them for cold hard cash. Thankfully the two are now in custody, and here’s hoping that the kids don’t follow in their parents footsteps and end up in a gold farming camp!
Link Image via Image*After
There are plenty of online gaming sites for youngsters, but most parents would rather have their kids get off the computer and use their brains for more creative fronts. Tinkatolli wants to change all that by blending an online realm for children with creativity and real life projects. The result should keep kids entertained, mentally stimulated and improve their tinkering skills. I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t wait for the site to go public.
Comments Off 
From an early age most boys learn that they are “should” play with trucks, love blue and play baseball. Girls are taught to play with dolls, love pink and play house. However more and more parents are educators are experimenting with raising children “genderless” such as the Canadian parents who would not reveal the gender of their baby. Now this preschool in Sweden leaves gender roles up to the kids. What do you think? Should children be raised “genderless?”
At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.
“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”
The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.
This Flickr gallery is titled “You spin me right ‘round, baby.” It’s a collection of 16 faces of children as they are being spun around by an adult. These pictures aren’t easy to shoot, but the joy in the kids’ faces makes it very much worthwhile. Many different photographers are represented here. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr member Nathan Jones)
Only recently have pit bulls gained a reputation for being dangerous dogs, mainly due to their popularity among those who breed and train dogs to be overly aggressive -or to just look scary. For generations, the breed was known as “The Nanny Dog.” See a collection of children’s pictures taken with their beloved and loyal dogs, all pit bulls, at What I Saw Today. Link -via the Presurfer
In 1976, three young men kidnapped a school bus full of children in Chowchillla, California. The 26 children and the driver were forced at gunpoint into a truck that was buried at a rock quarry. The bus driver, Ed Ray, and some of the older boys dug back through the hole through which they entered the underground chamber. It took them 16 hours to escape. Meanwhile, the kidnappers planned to demand $5 million in ransom, but the police phone lines were busy. Before the plan could be carried out, the victims had escaped. Richard Schoenfeld, James Schoenfeld, and Fred Woods received life sentences for the crime. They have served 35 years in prison. Some people believe that’s enough, including their prosecutor David Minier.
Since then, each has been denied parole dozens of times. Supporters say their continued imprisonment makes a mockery of the idea of rehabilitation. Minier, now a retired judge, favors parole for all three kidnappers.
“Quite frankly, I am simply amazed that Richard Schoenfeld, given his record as a model prisoner, was not paroled years ago,” Minier wrote the parole board in 2006.
At the Feb. 23 news conference in San Francisco, Dale Fore, one of the lead investigators in the case, said: “They were just dumb rich kids, and they paid a hell of a price for what they did.”
After retiring from the Madera County Sheriff’s Department, Fore worked as a private investigator for the Woods family’s attorneys, tracking down kidnapping victims to see if any would write letters of support for parole. None has.
“I might not be the most popular guy when I get back home,” Fore said. “But right is right. How much time do you want out of these guys?”
If you ask the people of Chowchilla, the answer is life without parole. On one hand, the crime as planned was horrific. On the other hand, no one was seriously hurt in the end. Many people convicted of murder receive lighter sentences. On the other hand, this crime could have ended as a mass murder. What do you think? Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Associated Press)
Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London’s harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
Link -via Nag on the Lake
All children need toys, but not all toys are created alike. While most bad toys are simply a bit boring, these eleven are the absolute worst of the worst. In fact, you’ll notice a lot of these are so ridiculous that they have actually taken on a cult collector’s item status and now cost quite a pretty penny.
There are toy guns, toy bow and arrow sets, toy swords and more, but somehow a toy tazer still seems to take things a touch too far –particularly considering the “Police Electric Baton Shock” actually gives out real shocks. On the upside, it’s only $3.50, so it’s much cheaper than most kid’s toys.
Russian Roulette is a ton of fun, but it’s unfortunately completely permanent. If you want to practice the game without those deadly consequences, then you’d better go ahead and start out with the Kaba Kick and the more gentle pink hippo kicks that replace bullets.
It’s totally normal for kids to pretend to do grown up jobs, after all, some kids play house, some play doctor, some play superhero and some play with chemistry sets, but who wants to be a janitor? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like a better idea to push your kids towards an intellectual pursuit than a job in the cleaning industry.
more …
Love it or hate it, It’s A Small World is undoubtedly a catchy song and an iconic Disney attraction. But did you know the ride was actually made on the fly as a last minute World’s Fair attraction or that it was originally slated to feature a variety of national anthems instead of its title track? Here are some fascinating facts you might not know about one of the park’s most popular rides.
Image via Thomas Hawk [Flickr]
One of Disney’s most iconic attractions actually started out as a last minute attraction to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The team was already working on a number of exhibits for the fair, including the Magic Skyway, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and The Carousel of Progress, when the program manager for the fair reached out to Disney and asked him to creat a tribute to UNICEF.
Always up to a challenge, Disney agreed and asked Mary Blair, Marc Davis, Alice Davis and Gregory S. Marinello for help. Mary gave the ride its overall feel and whimsy and inspired the general character design. Marc designed the scenes and the specific characters, while his wife, Alice, designed the costumes. Gregory designed the clock face on the exterior. Walt oversaw the design of the doll’s faces, which were all made to be exactly the same in order to promote the concept that all around the world children are all the same deep down.
Image via Andy Castro [Flickr]
The original nickname of the ride was “the happiest cruise that ever sailed” and the ride was intended to showcase the national anthem for each country portrayed. Unfortunately, this ended up sounding like a terrible mess in practice, so he hired the Sherman Brothers, the same gents who wrote the theme song for the Tiki Room, to create a song that would unify the ride’s characters together. It was only after the boys came back with their masterpiece that the ride got its name.
more …
The Gifford Children’s Choir of Racine, Wisconsin perform Trolololo (previously at Neatorama) as a Christmas gift to the people on the internet! Link -via The Daily What
Japanese kids bravely fight a zombie that invaded their home. Watch the subtitles for some adorable dialog. Give your opinion: child abuse, character building, or just plain fun? -via Metafilter
Jason Lee is a wedding photographer, but his really creative side comes out when he shoots his adorable daughters. You’ll find more pictures and an interview with Lee at My Modern Met. Link -via reddit
Why do poor people often have many kids, even though having a lot of children surely makes their tough lives even harder? Don’t blame them – blame evolutionary biology:
There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the best of the hand life has dealt us. If we understand this, it won’t just change the way we view the lives of the poorest in society, it will also show how misguided many current efforts to tackle society’s problems are – and it will suggest better solutions.
Evolutionary theory predicts that if you are a mammal growing up in a harsh, unpredictable environment where you are susceptible to disease and might die young, then you should follow a "fast" reproductive strategy – grow up quickly, and have offspring early and close together so you can ensure leaving some viable progeny before you become ill or die. For a range of animal species there is evidence that this does happen. Now research suggests that humans are no exception.
Certainly the theory holds up in comparisons between people in rich and poor countries. Bobbi Low and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor compared information from nations across the world to see if the age at which women have children changes according to their life expectancy (Cross-Cultural Research, vol 42, p 201). "We found that the human data fit the general mammalian pattern," says Low. "The shorter life expectancy was, the earlier women had their first child."
While most people cite Dr. Suess as their favorite children’s author, they often overlook another childhood favorite, Richard Scarry. Surprisingly though, Scarry is the number one selling children’s book author in the world and his titles are far more popular than the good Doctor’s. With a career spanning over four decades during which he wrote and illustrated more than 300 books that have been translated into 30 languages, Richard Scarry is the widely successful, but often overlooked, children’s book author that most of us have grown up reading.
It’s time to celebrate the not-so-scary Mr. Scarry in honor of what would have been his ninety-first birthday this June 5.
Image via Amazon
While most Richard Scarry books are incredibly educational for kids, he was a terrible student and hated school. He excelled at scaring the girls in his school in Boston and was permanently banned from the library after bringing in too many snakes to slither along the tables and bookshelves.
He received so many poor grades that he almost dropped out of school in junior high and ended up taking five years to finish high school after being held back due to excessive absences. During this period, many other children were dropping out of school to help keep their families afloat during the Depression, but Richard’s family owned a successful shop that helped keep them living comfortably despite the economic downturn.
Around this time, his artistic talents began blooming and on top of practicing his mother’s handwriting for excuse notes to get out of class, he also started finding himself quite able when it came to drawing the human form.
Unfortunately, his parents were far from excited when they learned about his new talents –as they made the discovery by finding his stack of charcoal drawings depicting nude girls. His dad asked him, after discovering an image of a beautiful woman with tassels on her breasts, “What’s going to become of you, Richard?” A born artist and trouble-maker, he already had a response ready, “if I’m going to be an artist, sir, I have to learn how to draw the human form.”
While his father desperately wanted him to go to an Ivy League school like Harvard, Richard’s terrible grades and bad attitude ensured that was little more than a pipe dream and he instead was sent off to a local business school where he again did miserably and he dropped out within his first year.
After long last, his father gave up hopes of having a child do anything more than be an artist and he finally sent the boy to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he flourished until he joined the army to fight in World War II. Scarry never did obtain a college diploma.
Image via Gwen [Flickr]
When Richard first joined the army, he listed his occupation as artist, which caused them to put him in radio repair school. Angered at the prospect of more schooling, he bombed the entry test and earned the esteemed reputation of having the lowest score ever recorded on the test –a negative 13. He later joked, “My exam mark was minus 13, so they decided to make me a corporal.”
Because he did so badly, he was instead assigned to be a military art director and was instructed to tell the troops why they were fighting and to share news from home. To do this job, he paraphrased clips from Time magazine and illustrated them and then sent them off as fliers.
He impressed his superiors enough that they soon promoted him to be the editor and writer of Publications for the Information and Morale Services section of the Allied Force Headquarters. With his new position, he was given enough leisure time to visit Africa, Algiers, Italy and France, an experience that left him with a lifelong drive to travel.
When the war ended, Scarry’s job had provided him enough experience developing content for a publication with over one million readers every week and he was able to get great positions in the New York art world without ever having to work his way up.
Immediately upon moving to New York he was given an illustrator job at Vogue, but he was fired three weeks later, when they claimed he just wasn’t right for the position. He was soon able to get a few positions at other magazines but really made a name for himself doing freelance children’s illustrations.
It wasn’t long before he submitted his impressive portfolio to the Artist and Writers Guild, a subsidiary in New York that was just about to start mass-producing a new line of children’s books that would sell for 25 cents each. He was immediately hired and started out doing artwork for other writers, including his future wife, Patricia Murphy, who he married in 1949.
By the early fifties, Scarry was inspired and experienced enough in children’s books that he decided to start writing his own titles. His first book, The Great Big Car and Truck Book, was published in 1951. It did moderately well and featured many of his interests, such as travel and technology, but it was most notable for being his only title to use humans instead of athropomorphized animals. His second book, Rabbit and His Friends, introduced his use of talking animals, but his true success didn’t take place until the 1963 title The Best Word Book Ever.
This groundbreaking work served as a sort of picture dictionary that was broken up by word type, rather than being organized alphabetically. This was also the first place he featured many of his famous anthropomorphic characters that would later be the backbone of his Big Busy World and Busytown.
Image via Senor Ryan [Flickr]
The reason the classic Scarry books have done so well to this day is because they are so complex, yet so easy to follow. Children love that they can flip through the pages before they can even read and make up stories about the characters. At the same time, there is so much going on in his pictures that they often re-read the books over and over to make sure they catch all the action on every page.
This seems to be what Scarry was going for. He once said, “I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten. I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.”
That’s not all there is to like. When parents read the books to kids, they enjoy the fact that the questions proposed throughout the pages start getting the children thinking and talking, meaning Scarry’s books help educate youngsters on an array of levels that go far deeper than most children’s books.
Another positive aspect of the titles is his use of animals. While they are certainly cute, they also serve to be much more enjoyable and identifiable to children. One of the reasons his books have done so well throughout the world is the fact that animals do not have racial characteristics, which allow all children to connect with the little girl bunny or little boy cat. He explained “children can identify more closely with pictures of animals than they can with pictures of another child. They see an illustration of a blond girl or a dark-haired boy, who they know is somebody other than themselves, and competition creeps in. With imagination — and children all have marvelous imagination — they can easily identify with an anteater who is a painter or a goat who is an Indian.”
Images via Pinot & Dita and beccaplusmolly [Flickr]
Of course, that’s not to say Richard’s work was always free from issues revolving around political correctness. While his Big, Busy World books were based around real observations he noticed while traveling, the post seventies world was far less accepting of a near-sighted panda from Hong Kong or Manuel of Mexico with a pot of beans on his head. As a result, he largely stopped writing these titles and Random House stopped distributing the titles.
As if that weren’t enough controversy, mothers soon started being offended by Scarry’s decidedly fifties roles of housewives taking care of the children while the husbands go off to work. Really though, Richard wasn’t sexist, he was just not with the times. As soon as he heard the complaints, he happily revised his images to show female farmers and police officers and men pushing strollers and cooking in the kitchen. If you’re interested, the differences between the versions are well documented in this Flickr set by user Kokogiak.
While the artist originally started painting his works in full-color watercolors, his signature books are all done using a work process he perfected throughout the years. First he would sketch out his panels with pencil, then he would re-draw the finalized versions with blue pencil. Then he would color in all the red areas on every page, then blue, then yellow, etc. and at the end, he would draw in all the detail lines with a pen.
After he finished the works, he would tape on his narrative texts that quickly pecked out on a typewriter. Many of these contained spelling errors and other typos, but he left that to the editors to worry about. Despite his popularity, Richard was always an artist first and a writer a distant second.
While he always hated leaving white space and loved complicated machineries and cut-away diagrams, his early titles aren’t as loaded with these aspects. When things progressed on though, his titles were increasingly complex. By the time he completed his final work, Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever, the sixty-six year old Scarry’s eyesight was failing miserably, but that didn’t stop him from finishing the artwork for the monstrous 15 3/4 x 24 inches book. It was so large that Random House had to charge $29 per copy, but it was so popular that the first printing sold out in no time despite the price.
Image via Rotten
In their later years, Richard and his wife bought a chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. Here he worked diligently on his books, sitting at his desk every day between 8 A.M. and 4 P.M. After his eyesight failed, he stopped working on his books, but he still lived happily with his wife until he passed away from a fatal heart attack on April 30, 1994.
These days, his son Richard Scarry Jr. carries on the tradition, writing and illustrating books under his father’s name and periodically under the name “Huck Scarry,” which he adapted from Huckle Cat, one of the most common characters in the Busytown world.
Image via JB Publishing
Sources: Ciao UK, Wikipedia, Barnes & Noble, Carnegie Museums, Kirjasto and Rotten
To, ahem, celebrate (that’s the word!) Mother’s Day, Urlesque has a compilation of videos of mothers pranking their children.
Why? Because there’s nothing that says "I Love You" like a fake chest knife wound and scary Halloween mask. Thanks for the psychologically scarring us for life, moms! Link
Lenore Skenazy, a mom and the author of Free-Range Kids has declared May 22nd – the weekend before Memorial Day – as the very first “Take Our Children to the Park… And Leave Them There Day.”
It is all part of Skenazy’s crusade to bring back common sense parenting to what are some very overprotective times. Her basic philosophy is that kids need to get out in the world, and that even though there might be some risk involved, the risk is small and well worth taking.
Most of us used to play outside in the park, without our parents, without cell phones, without Purell or bottled water and we survived! Thrived! We cherish the memories! And if you believe the million studies that I’m always publishing here, kids are healthier, happier and better-adjusted if they get to spend some time each day in “free play,” without adults hovering.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Previously at Neatorama: Would you let your 9-year-old ride the subway alone?
Check out some clever words to describe the way kids exasperate their parents. My kids have outgrown most of these phases, but I remember them well! Link
Comments Off 
A medical examiner in Oregon has concluded that a 6 year old girl committed suicide after being sent to her room. The police disagree with the finding and view it as an accident. The question has become whether a small child has the mental capacity to commit suicide.
While her mother and three siblings were in another part of the house, the authorities said, Samantha got inside an unused crib that had no mattress or box spring. She placed a child’s belt around her neck and tied it to the upper railing of the crib, hanging herself. The first-grader died at a hospital after the family and paramedics tried to save her.
Dr. Clifford Nelson, the deputy state medical examiner, ruled the death a suicide, a conclusion police did not support.
“The disagreement is a little more philosophical than it is material to the case,” McMinnville police Capt. Dennis Marks said prior to the public records request. “It’s not that we disagree with the mechanics of what happened. It’s the finding that a 6-year-old could form that kind of intent.”
Nelson said it’s a disturbing case, but he couldn’t “fudge the facts to make people feel better.”
For now, her death is listed as the youngest suicide on record in Oregon. This classification will likely have both legal and societal implications.
As a side note: this obviously falls under the “orama” part of neatorama. As a parent I personally found the article incredibly disturbing on many levels.
I remember my favorite books from when I was a kid, and none of them covered such wide-ranging topics as these. See some of the strangest, funniest, and most disturbing children’s books ever.
I remember reading The House That Jack Built. I loved it. This book takes that same rhyming style and turns it into a ghetto-fabulous tale of the dangers of crack, from start to finish. It begins with the exploited South American workers in the coca fields and goes all the way to the streets of the inner city.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sish2000.
Got anger? A new national survey of 1,800 Americans by Scott Schieman reveal that chances are, you’re either young, have kids (duh!) or have less education.
For one, people under 30 experienced anger of all forms or intensities more frequently than did older adults. This was mainly due to the fact that young people are more likely to be affected by three core stressors that can trigger angry feelings, Schieman said:
* Time pressures
* Economic hardship
* Interpersonal conflict at the workplaceTime pressures had the strongest link to anger, especially low-grade versions termed "feelings of annoyance," the study found.
Those who were under financial strain tended to report higher levels of anger, a connection that could be particularly important in today’s flagging economy, Schieman noted. The financial influence tended to be stronger among women and younger adults.
Having children was also associated with angry feelings and behaviors, such as yelling, particularly in women, the survey found.
"There’s obviously a lot of joys and benefits that come with parenthood," but other aspects of parenting, such as having to discipline a misbehaving child, can cause feelings of anger and annoyance, Schieman said.
Illustration by Shaun Tan
The Book Review has an annual roundup of the best in children’s books from an illustrative point. Books for kids are crucial for learning the language, and if you can lure them in with outstanding visuals, all the better. NYT has the ten best, including this one from Shaun Tan’s “Tales From Outer Suburbia.” Tan also won a slot in 2007 for the phenomenal, wordless “The Arrival.”
Children are rarely familiar with the names the LEGO company gives its various bricks and accessories. Giles Turnbull was delighted to find his son had his own terms for each piece. So he gathered more children, four in all, to find out what names they used, and assembled those names in a handy chart. Link -via Buzzfeeed
