The lack of postings since November had probably made this a bit obvious, but I figured I might as well make it official: A job change that's much more demanding on my time and also includes some...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-hiatus.html
Full disclosure: I grew up a half-mile from Symphony Space on Manhattan's Upper West Side (I recall going to some of the very earliest Selected Shorts readings in high school, back before the...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/in-concert-symphony-spaces-just-kidding.html
When I first heard that Elena Moon Park, one of the regulars in Dan Zanes 's band for some years now, was coming out with an album of East Asian folk songs of her own, I was pretty confident it...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/new-music-rabbit-days-and-dumplings.html
You'd think that at some point the New York Review Children's Collection would just run out of obscure, unknown and out-of-print kid lit that's astonishingly brilliant to reissue. But they don...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/newish-books-wolf-story.html
Since I'm on a grammar kick of late , I should mention a second source of no-really-it's-fun learning on the subject that Dash has been obsessed with lately: Grammaropolis , an album of songs a...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/new-music-grammaropolis.html
Sometimes I find myself wondering what it must have been like to read a true classic—kids' or adults' variety—right as it first came out, when no one knew, for sure, that it was a classic y...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/new-books-high-skies-adventures-of-blue.html
Okay, before I start, full disclosure: I make my living largely as a copy editor. And I've occasionally been accused by certain close friends and family members of being a bit, shall we say, ov...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/new-books-super-grammar.html
I'll admit to having been spoiled a bit by They Might Be Giants . It was hard not to be, when a band of which I had already been a longtime fan chose the period when we had our first child to m...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/new-music-ozomatli-presents-ozokidz.html
As I grew older and out of children's chapter books, all those years ago, I kept only a handful of favorites on my bookshelf. I'm not sure I knew why, exactly, even back then—because I thou...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/old-school-wizard-of-earthsea.html
We always feel a bit guilty when we let our two sons sit watching videos for long periods of time. But let's face it: Sometimes it's unavoidable, when we have to be certain they'll be completel...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/security-blanket-magic-school-bus-videos.html
As many public radio stations mentioned at the time, this past July 14 marked the hundredth anniversary of Woody Guthrie's birth . Among all his other great musical achievements, Guthrie record...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-music-little-seed.html
I don't know if Komako Sakai's 2010 picture book Mad at Mommy will be considered a classic or not, but as far as we're concerned, it oughta be. Our four-year-old has recently rediscovered...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/security-blanket-mad-at-mommy_27.html
Illustrator Seymour Chwast is renowned for his long career of, well, illustrious commercial design work . Chwast's style, once you've seen it, is instantly recognizable, both for its cultured-...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-books-get-dressed.html
Philip C. Stead established himself as an author with a talent for channeling the charm of classic children's books last year with his and his wife, Erin's, breakout hit A Sick Day for Amos ...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-books-home-for-bird.html
Our three-but-almost-four-year-old, Griffin, is showing some trends in the picture books he takes most interest in these days: adventure, and friendship. Kenneth Kraegel's King Arthur's Very Gr...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/new-books-king-arthurs-very-great.html
It's one of those precious delights of parenthood to share a book we loved as kids ourselves to our own children, and to relive that thrill of discovery through their eyes. But it's a completel...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/security-blanket-bear-that-wasn.html
It's been a summer of plenty for our family when it comes to kids' music: Nearly all our favorite artists have put out new albums, and every one seems to maintain or surpass the respective m...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-music-spicy-kid.html
I've said it before, but I keep finding new evidence: There's something special about Australian-born picture-book authors and illustrators. (For anyone who hasn't read my prior encomiums on th...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-books-no-bears.html
Well, I had intended, in advance of our family's recent vacation in western Ontario (where, I was warned by my in-laws, Internet service might be spotty at best), to bank a number of posts to ...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/security-blanket-lego-harry-potter-for.html
I guess the first big wave of all-star music compilation albums for charity came in the 1980s, coming off the high-profile all-star singles of Band Aid and USA for Africa (though really Geo...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-music-science-fair.html
OK, I know not every kid likes snakes. A lot of adults don't like snakes, not even a little bit. But our older son does, and so when—just a few days after he'd proudly finished his first-grad...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-books-awesome-snake-science.html
I sometimes worry that my enthusiasm for Recess Monkey has reached a point of absurdity, but I come by it honestly: The Seattle "teacher-rockers" (as they are now both truthfully and marvelou...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-music-in-tents.html
Twenty years ago, Seattle was the epicenter of new music for us Gen-Xers...so I suppose it's not surprising that in 2012, it would be the epicenter of the new wave of music for kids. (This is...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-music-shake-it-up-shake-it-off.html
Many great picture books for young children are existential at root. (The works of the late Maurice Sendak are merely one notable example.) Of course, it's the point at which that existential...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-books-oh-no-george.html
By now we've come to expect a certain (high) level of quality from Aardman Animation —after all, these were the animated movies we started watching back in the 1990s, well before we had kids,...
http://youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-movies-pirates-band-of-misfits.html