Pictures from Our Vacation

What a great way to appreciate the small things, the quick delights, the simple pleasures of just being. While that sounds like "heady" stuff for a picture book, the tale is wonderfully rendered by Lynne Rae Perkins. I love the maps, the incidental moments, the photos that don't do justice to the experience (the photo of top of the mountains only or the hostile guard dog on their search for the secret waterhole), that ultimately, make for a wonderfully heartfelt vacation of memories. Perkins is a first-rate storyteller and illustrator of small moments.

I am using this book in my writer's workshop as an anchor book. It has great text both in fiction and non fiction. I love how the author uses the thought bubbles to help present different points of view. I can also use it to show my students how incorporate photographs along with drawn illustrations in their own writing.

This is a picture book about a family headed off on vacation. The mother in the story gives the kids an instant camera and a journal to record thoughts and images from the trip. Follow the family vacation through the eyes of children! The kids in the book learned that pictures are nice to have but it's the memories that remain in their hearts that will mean the most to them. If you are headed on a vacation with your kids this is the perfect book to read as a family before you head out!

This is a wonderful book. I wanted to get in a car with my camera and take a trip. I like how the camera pictures didn't really capture the essence of the vacation since they didn't have people in most of them. The illustrations in the book are filled with pictures and every picture made my imagination run wild!

Surely those between the ages of four and eight will love this book, but I'm 48 and love it too. It's a wonderful story about a family taking a vacation to the family farm where they'll spend time with their grandparents. They go to a memorial for an aunt and the kids meet even more relatives. We learn that the dead aunt had spunk and had chained herself to a tree to prevent it from being cut down (I don't think that's how she died). Who wouldn't want to read about such a person? The illustrations are fabulous. Even though it rains, the family plays cards, read books, watches the rain, waits for it to stop, then finally it does stop raining and the dad takes the kids to his favorite swimming place, but it's not that easy to find anymore. It's a book that goes here and there and you feel fortunate to be a part of the journey. It's June and this book is the perfect motivator to take off on a family vacation.