Good Stuff Cheap: Part Deux

Oh Ollies, how I love you, most especially your books.

Awesome find #1: 

I'm slowly working on building up a collection of awesome, personally relevant children's books for rotating into my yet-to-be-made/purchased Mary Poppins bag. And I've loved great apes ever since Biological Anthropology my freshman year of college.  (Jane Goodall, you are my hero.) At one point, an entire wall of my room was decorated with photos of such, and if you are ever unfortunate enough to mistake a chimp for a monkey in my presence, you'll quickly learn just how seriously I take my primatological classifications.

So I'm ecstatic over my serendipitous find of Ape by conservation biologist Martin Jenkins with beautiful illustrations by Vicky Wilson.  The book does a fair job of addressing, in a manner accessible to young children, some of the less warm and fuzzy (human?) aspects of chimpanzee behavior.

"Chimp's gang sometimes get into fights with other chimp gangs -- nasty fights, with lots of biting and hitting. 

Made me wonder if they'd address some of the more human aspects of bonobo behavior

Oh, I BET she does. :-)

  Plus, I learned something new:

"Orangutans are mostly vegetarians. They eat a lot of different kinds of fruit but are especially fond of durians."

Awesome find #2:

Montessori-minded people know how hard it is to find early childhood materials that showcase the lowercase alphabet.  Enter Click, Clack, Quackity-Quack: A Typing Adventure by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. One of the materials I designed for my Montessori language arts module actually had as one of its direct aims increasing the child's familiarity with the layout of a QWERTY keyboard, so I LOVE, even if it isn't 100% phonetic. ("Only one pig peeking" - Granted, it would have been hard to work an octopus into a story about a farm.)

And speaking of farms..

Awesome find #3:

I know I should have some sort of Child of the 80s loyalty to vintage Little People, but this is the one instance where I think the revamped version has improved upon the original idea, helped along by the Claymation and the Aaron Neville.  Props, Fisher-Price!  Seriously, does it get any cuter than this?  I might start collecting, for ME.

Anyway, I'm giving this to Lily, I swear! I even went back and exchanged the circus themed one I'd originally picked up for the farm one, knowing how she digs farm stuff.  But do you know hard it is to find Paint With Water Books? Way harder than you would think given their level of awesomeness and superiority to coloring books. (What's a little spilled water compared to Junior accenting your walls with crayon?)