I'm Patrick Adams. And I'm Caroline Lashir. And this is Librarians of Littles, a podcast
where we share books, ideas of how to wrangle the students in a pre-K library, and give
you some different tips and tricks for connecting books to makerspace activities. Today we're
sharing two books, the first of which is Cat Side Up, Cat Side Down, a book of prepositions.
This book was written by Anna Rochevek. It was published by a Fuel and Friends book,
an imprint of McMillan Publishing Group LLC in 2023. This book was on the Bank Street Best
Children's Books of the Year list, the Texas 2x2 list, Evanston Public Libraries 101 Great
Books for Kids 2023. Anna Rochevek grew up in Oklahoma. She was an exchange student in
Japan in 2000 and began knitting. Her enjoyment of knitting and interest of characters from
Japan, including Hello Kitty, has inspired her imagination and imaginary world of knitted
characters that inhabit a world called Mochi Mochiland. These characters are used in animations,
art installations, and knitting patterns. She has a knitting website, which we will link
in the show notes, and pattern books. Her character-based art has been exhibited in
the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Korea, and Japan, and her stop-motion animation
clients include Nickelodeon, Sesame Workshop, and The Washington Post.
Her other books include multiple knitting books, including Adventures in Mochi Mochiland,
Huge and Huggable Mochi Mochi, and Teeny Tiny Mochi Mochi, and Short Dog, Long Dog, a book
of opposites, which was just published in February of 2025.
So a summary of this book. This is a rhyming story of cats in amusing places and situations
introducing prepositions like over, under, around, and many more. And this is definitely
an adorable book, as I was saying. My wife is a huge crafty kind of person, and she thought
this book was amazing. All of the illustrations in the book are actually images, they're pictures,
they're not even illustrations, they're pictures of the knitted cats that the author has created.
So like when it says cat up, it's a head of a cat sticking out of a purse, and cat side
down is a cat's bottom end sticking out of like a bag of groceries. But everything in
it is knitted, besides being an amazing author coming up with this creative book, being able
to knit all of the different images, like the cats that's swept high in a way by a cat-shaped
balloon, and the fact that it's all just knitted. It's kind of breathtaking, it's pretty amazing
that this is a talent that she's able to use to make these pictures for this book. It's
very impressive, I'm sure. It's also incredibly time-intensive, for sure. But I think that
students would definitely be very kind of awestruck by looking at these pictures and
seeing the knitted characters and seeing the different situations that they're in. Because
I know I was just kind of staring at some of the pictures being like, how did she do
that? Like how much time did that take? And then just the added bonus that it is teaching
like a part of speech, it's teaching preposition. So like how things are in relation to other
things. And all of the preposition words are bold in the book, so that makes it kind of
easy to point them out to the students while you're reading the story. And then that rhyming
aspect of it will definitely keep the students' attention as well.
I agree with all the things you said. It's really kind of awe-inspiring to look at the
illustrations in this book and see how intricate a lot of those, I don't know what I would
call them. I guess dolls that she knitted are. Would you call them dolls? I don't know.
Toys? I don't know. But there's a lot of detail in them and it just, it must have taken such
an amazing amount of time to put everything together the way she did. Love the simple
text and again I love that it teaches prepositions. That's an extremely difficult concept to teach
to our younger learners just because it's just not a concrete thing to teach, the location
of something. Because whether I move my cup to the right or left, it's still a cup, but
just teaching that it's the location of it. That's really very difficult to teach. I love
that this book helps with that concept. Yeah, and I'm just like the amount of talent
because I'm not a crafty person when it comes to this kind of stuff at all. But I wish it
was just so cool to see the creativity of how each cat is just unique in how she made
it, the design or the shape or the colors. Even like my wife was pointing out as she
was looking at it, just some of the details like the cat that is affixed to a curtain
for added suspense. If you look at it, the curtain has like random little holes in it
from like cat claws and stuff like that level of detail. It's just really pretty cool. And
I don't know, I really like this book. And I'm looking forward to getting and reading
the short dog long dog book of opposites because it's also all of the dogs in that book are
knitted the same way. So I think that'll be really fun. As far as a rating, I would definitely
say that I would think this is going to be up there. It's not too heavy on the text.
The pictures are engaging. It's teaching a skill that is very much needed for the age
group. So I'm thinking maybe four and a half, maybe even a five, because I really like this
book. I really like it a lot. So I think a five. I'm going to go with five.
All right. I think that's fair. They're very engaging illustrations, very simple text,
really easy to engage with. Yeah. Solid choice.
There we go. And then for a makerspace connection, this one, I had a couple different ideas basically
working with those prepositions. So you can do a couple different things. The first one
would be if you want to go kind of two dimensional, you could give the students a cut out picture
of a cat and have them draw on a piece of white paper. They can use some markers, some
colored pencils, some crayons, draw a setting, and then they can take that cut out of the
cat and kind of move it to different locations on the picture and explain to you using those
prepositions where the cat is. The same idea just in three dimensions if you find like
even just using some of those like farm animal counters or the bear counters, have the kids
use some Legos to build something and then they can move the counter from place to place
and use those prepositions that way to kind of show some understanding of how prepositions
work and kind of how they relate to location. Yeah, I love that idea and it really builds
upon what you kind of introduced with the book. For our library of littles management
tip this week, let's discuss bookshelves. Bookshelves in our libraries are often kind
of very organized and very challenging for our younger students to find things on. And
I know that even when we do our best, it's going to take a little bit of time and a lot
of practice to teach the kids how to find books on the shelves, but we can do some things
to make that much more easily accessible. One of the main things that we can do is
genrefying our picture book sections so that the students can look for certain types of
books a lot easier. I'm in the process of going through my library working on setting
up so that I can have my books genrefied at the moment. I'm going through and labeling
them all, figuring out the different categories. I've got a list of about, I want to say it's
about 18 different categories. It's a lot, but it makes it so that the kids have an idea
of where they can find books. Because way too often our kids come up to us and say,
where are the dragon books? Where are the superhero books? Where are the dog books? And if you're
organizing your picture books by the author's last name, then there's no good answer to
that question. But if we have all of the books that focus on dragons in one spot, or if we
have all the books that focus on dogs in one spot, and they're clearly labeled on the shelves,
not only is it easier for us to help them find them, but they will be able to take an
initiative and look for those signage and find the books that they're looking for on
their own. Kind of take some of that ownership on themselves instead of just hoping that
an adult can come by and point out where they want to be looking. So this is a highly intensive
process. On the last campus at one of the two campuses that you're on, Caroline, it took
us the entire, most of this 2020 school year during COVID. And the only reason why we got
it done in the amount of time we did was because the students weren't coming into the library,
so we could just pull out all the books and make stacks to organize them and label them
before putting them back on the shelves. And so when your library's in use, that takes
a lot more time, a lot more planning, and it might, it means that probably late nights
or coming up on the weekends to move those books around once everything's labeled and
taken care of and then making the signage and then reteaching where everything is. But
I honestly found that once it was done, the kids took a great deal of ownership. There
were still some kids that were like, where can I find this kind of book? But most of
the kids could look at the signs and be like, okay, this is where the dragon books are, or
here's where the princess books are, and be able to find at least the general area where
they were looking. From there, they might need some help finding the specific book, but at
least they're in the right spot. So I think this is a, I think it's something that is
beneficial definitely for younger kids, but I'll say even my fifth grade students, if
they're trying to find a picture book, and they're looking by the author's last name,
Alphab, the searching alphabetically for anything is not a skill that is used as often
anymore.
No, it's really not.
Me as kids, we probably, we used it because we had to look up words in the dictionary,
and we had to go and find the books on the shelves and that kind of thing. And now that's
not so frequent. I don't think any of my fifth graders have ever touched a physical dictionary.
They pull up Google or there, like when they're in their different programs that they're using
in school, a lot of them have built in dictionaries where they can just search for the, like,
search for the idea or search for the word, or if it's close, it'll give them some suggestions
on how to spell. So finding, finding things alphabetically is not a skill that is necessarily
taught very often. It's something that I'm attempting to teach, but it takes a long time,
and if that isn't being reinforced anywhere else, it takes a lot more time. So trying
to organize the books, even the fifth graders, I think, if they're, because they know what
they want, but finding the author is challenging. So if they, if they had a sign where it was
like these are the dragon books or these are the Mo Willems, Elephant and Piggy books,
like, they would definitely use that signage to help them find what they're looking for.
Yeah, I think that's a really great tip. Both of the libraries that I'm working in right
now already have all of everything genre-fied, and it's very, very helpful. The only thing
that I would add is when you make your sections, just make sure that you have big pictures,
like use text with pictures, because especially for our younger learners, they're not going
to, if they're looking for books about dragons, they may not necessarily know what the word
dragon looks like, but they'll recognize a picture of a dragon. So just make sure you
have lots of visuals when you're labeling everything. And I even, for quite a few of
my books, instead of a traditional spine label, like I still have a traditional spine label,
but in addition to my traditional spine label, I'll put just a very small picture of a dragon
on the spine next to it so that the kids can see this is the picture of the small big picture
of the dragon on the book itself. It goes in this section and they can see the bigger
picture picture of the dragon next to it. So they can tell like all these books belong
together with this particular section. So that's really helpful for them as well.
Absolutely. I agree. Definitely. Visuals are always going to be important because like
you said, those pre-K kids know they want a dragon book, but if they don't know what
the word looks like, they can find it by the picture, which is definitely helpful.
The second book that we're going to talk about today is called Mr. Kitty. It's lost. It's
published by Little Brown and Company 2023. It is written and illustrated by Greg Pizzoli.
This book is on the 2024 Texas 2x2 list and Pizzoli has won the Geisel Award three times.
This particular book didn't win it, but several of its other books did.
Greg Pizzoli studied English literature at Millersville University. He earned his master's
of fine art in book arts and printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
He eventually left to pursue making picture books full-time. He currently works in a studio
that he shares with his wife Kay Healy, who is a printmaker and author. They live in South
Philadelphia with their two daughters. Greg Pizzoli's other books, there are a lot. His
three Geisel winners are The Watermelon Seat, Good Night Owl, and The Book Hog. He is both
the author and illustrator of all three award-winning books. In addition to numerous other books,
he has written and illustrated. He has also illustrated books for other authors of note
including Two Little Trains by Margaret Weiss-Brown and The Jack series by Mac Barnett.
Okay, so for this book, when a little girl's kitty goes missing, she and her dog go in
search of him by giving the reader clues to help find the kitty. For example, one of them
is Mr. Kitty has five yellow spots. Upon turning the page, the reader finds that it is not
Mr. Kitty but something else entirely, such as five yellow snakes. After much searching,
the reader finally finds Mr. Kitty but then loses something else at the end. I thought
this was a really great early reader, much like Pizzoli's other books. It's really intended
for students who are just learning to read. It's got kind of a predictable formula, making
it a little bit easier for our emergent readers. It's really simple text. The illustrations
are kind of bold, but they're not overwhelming. So it lets the readers focus on the text a
little bit more, which is nice. I really loved all the die cuts that it has because you'll
see just five small little circles and you turn the page hoping to find the cat. Greg
Pizzoli just turns it into something else entirely and makes the kids think a little
bit about what could be on the next page. Since it starts out with five yellow dots
and then it goes down to four of the next object, I can't remember what it is off the
top of my head. But then it goes to three, then two, and then one.
It's four paws and then yeah.
But as it's counting down, by the time you get to three, I think the kids have figured
out it's probably not going to be Mr. Kitty. So it kind of helps the kids kind of... It
keeps them engaged by kind of wanting to know what's going to come next. If it's not Mr.
Kitty, what could it be so they can be a little bit more creative with that as well.
I really enjoyed the story. I thought it was a really good fun book to read and it was kind
of... I think a lot of kids would find it really funny as they're turning the page and kind
of seeing all the different things that aren't Mr. Kitty. And then I loved that at the end
Mr. Kitty wasn't really a kitty, but a big old lion. That was a fun surprise at the end
too. So yeah, it was a really cute story. I really
loved this one.
Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot. I like that there are those bright colors. So like first you're
looking for that bright yellow, those dots, and then it goes to orange and you get the
purple. And you know, so those bright colors are really great. The fact that we're looking
for certain shapes. So you're kind of introducing colors and shapes and then the counting down
aspect of it. And then you've got all of the animals that aren't what we're looking for
are kind of like absurd things that you wouldn't normally just run across. You know, like I
don't know how often you would see four monkeys, but that's not something that every day you
would expect to see. And so the fact that you're coming across four monkeys and three
elephants and that kind of stuff, which is kind of silly. And I think you're right. I
think that would definitely keep the kids focus and engagement because they're they're
wanting to know what the next ridiculous kind of thing is that we know it's probably not
Mr. Kitty, but what could it be? So I think it's definitely a great book for those younger
learners. I think it's definitely a great story.
Yeah, I think for this one, if I was, I think I might give this one, I might give it a five
out of five for an emergent reader. I think it's a good solid choice for an emergent reader.
I think it's a five out of five for that. Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, for sure. It's going to be great for our younger learners.
And I think you're right. I think five out of five solid
for a makerspace activity for this one, because there were so many different shapes throughout
the book, book and colors as well. I think it would be really fun to have a bunch of
those die cuts that you see throughout the book and have like a bunch of those yellow
circles and those little red paws and such already cut out and then the kids could kind
of collage and put together new pictures and kind of expand on that and see what other
pictures they could make with those same shapes and that were mentioned in the book. I think
that would be a really fun one to do. Yeah. Yeah, because I think they could be very creative
with that and be able to kind of put them together in different ways to come up with
some pretty interesting things. Very cool. All right. So thank you all so much for joining
us today on this episode of librarians of littles. We hope you got some fresh ideas
for inspiring young readers. Please be sure to subscribe and find us on social media.
And we hope you'll join us again next week. Happy reading.
Thank you for listening to this episode of librarians of littles. We hope that you enjoyed
it. Check back each Wednesday for a new episode. Librarians of littles is a podcast produced
and hosted by Patrick Adams and Caroline Leger. Editor Patrick Adams. Our theme song is performed
by JD Adams. You can follow us on Instagram at librarians of littles. You can follow us
on blue sky at littleslibrarian.bsky.social. And you can send us your emails at librarianoflittlespod.gmail.com.
I have to say my wife loved the book that I chose because she's very crafty and she
was like, this is the coolest. It was cute. It was cute. Your wife is really crafty. It's
true. She's got some skills. Yeah. And so like when she was like, they knitted all of
that, she was like, I want to check this out. So pretty cool. Yeah.