Off to Bed

Another Petersham book from our collection!  This one is a set of seven animal stories centered around bedtime, perfect for night time reading.  The pictures are just as cute as can be!

Off to Bed

Maud and Miska Petersham 1954

One Minute Till Bedtime

 Another great find at the thrift store the other day!  I like this modern collection of short poems,  just right for reading before bed or really any time.  Mostly rhyming, sometimes silly, but purely enjoyable, definitely read them out loud.  The simple artwork by Christoph Niemann adds just the right touch.

One Minute Till Bedtime

selected by Kenn Nesbitt

art by Christoph Niemann 2016

This one especially for Madeleine, my hippo loving girl!

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Woodland Dreams

 Another Christmas gift book. It's time for the animals to go to bed. We follow a little girl and her dog through the woods as the sweet poem lyrically calls the little animals home.  I love the full page illustrations and the neat perspective of the artwork.  The last page is full of the drawings that the girl was making as she walked, which was a wonderful touch! 

Woodland Dreams

Karen Jameson

pictures by Marc Boutavant 2020

The Bed Book

The Bed Book

Sylvia Plath

pictures by Arnold McCully 1976

Who knew Sylvia Plath had written a rhyming children's poem?  A great bedtime read (as you can tell from the title!), it's filled with all sorts of silly, wonderful beds.  A tank bed (for a "cobbledy town"), a hammock, a North-Pole bed made of fur, a submarine bed, or a "Jet-Propelled Bed for visiting Mars with mosquito nets for the shooting stars."  Imaginative and fun, it made us want to invent our own magical sort of bed.  After all, who wants to sleep in "just a white little tucked-in-tight little nighty-night little turn-out-the-light little bed!"? 

When the Dark Comes Dancing

When the Dark Comes Dancing

A Bedtime Poetry Book

compiled by Nancy Larrick

illustrated by John Wallner 1983

I loved the title of this book.  It's a frequent bedtime companion, with all the poems and rhymes and lullabies chosen especially for little ones settling into bed.  Sleepy and lyrical, read in a gentle voice, these poems will surely put sweet dreams into your child's head.

Past Eight O'Clock

Since they share a room often Madeleine will listen to the books I read to Charlotte.  And the other way around.  Last night Madeleine read to us a very funny Edgar Allan Poe story she found called "Loss of Breath".  I had no idea Poe wrote humorous stories and this one was pretty outrageous!  (I don't think Charlotte got much out of it though.)

I'm quite partial to Joan Aiken and I thought this was a perfect bedtime book (it's even called Goodnight Stories).  Starting while we were on vacation in Illinois, we read one every night.  Madeleine listened for a few nights and thought that some were better stories than others.  ("Oh, Can Ye Sew Cushions?" was in my opinion the very best one.)   But each of them has that mixture of magic and  feel of Dickens that is particular to Aiken (Leon Garfield and Roald Dahl as well).  

Past Eight O'Clock

Goodnight Stories

Joan Aiken

pictures by Jan Pienkowski

The fantastic silhouettes of Jan Pienkowski are scattered throughout the book.  Each story is based on a lullaby and includes some rhyming verses. 

There was one thing about their house that they didn't know.  Every year, on a special day in winter, when the sun shone upon one particular spot on the floor in one particular room- if somebody- just at that moment- happened to be singing a special note of a special song- then, something might happen. 

More books by Joan Aiken:

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

The Moon's Revenge

Other books illustrated by Jan Pienkowski:

Christmas