The first Carnival of Children's Literature

At Here in the Bonny Glen, Melissa Wiley has done a great job of putting together the first Carnival of Children's Literature. (Melissa herself has written children's books, check out her website.) There are a ton of interesting posts in the carnival. I've spent close to two hours looking through them. It was fun to see so many authors of children's books are also blogging.

Here are some of the postings I especially enjoyed:

At Sweetness and Light: Love of Books, a homeschool mother posts about how important books are in their study.

At Six and the City, another homeschooling mother decides to study geography when one of her children says that to get to Mexico you have to go through Alaska. The United States maps he had seen showed Alaska under the 48 states. The mother writes about her efforts to teach where the nations of the world are located.

Camille blogs at Book Moot about meeting Jonathan Stroud. Jonathan has written many books, including the popular Bartimaeus Trilogy: The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, and Ptolemy's Gate. I had never heard of the author, or these books. In reading through this carnival I was surprised by just how many children's authors I didn't know. Camille attended a book signing by Jonathan Stroud and was impressed.

At Semicolon Sherry Early writes about reading a book to her children. She made an interesting point, that the same book, Swift Rivers, was interesting in different ways to her children.

At CLASSical Liberalism Kenneth Gregg provides a brief, and fascinating, biography of Jules Verne. I learned a lot about Jules Verne from this post. For example From the Earth to the Moon was first published in 1865, and was very amazing in predicting much of what America would do in the Apollo program.

At Trivium Pursuit is an insightful discussion about what makes a book good. While OK once in awhile, most of us won't let our children live on junk food. Likewise it is important to make sure our children don't read just junk books.

The Carnival of Children's Literature will be coming back again in a month. In March it will be hosted at Chicken Spaghetti. Submissions are due by March 3rd. This carnival has gotten off to a great start and I'm looking forward to the next editions.