Twelve Hats for Lena

This week for Picture Book Friday I decided to go back to the archives and pull out a book by a celebrated young children's author, Karen Katz.  Her books for toddlers are adorably illustrated and beautifully interactive.  While my favorite toddler book of hers, Where Is Baby's Belly Button? is a book all little people and their parents must own, I thought I would focus on one of her less well known books, Twelve Hats for Lena.  My children were very taken by this book and its dog eared pages are a testiment to how much we all enjoyed it.

Title:       Twelve Hats for Lena

Author:   Karen Katz

Target:    Preschool - Kindergarten

What this book is about:
Lena Katz (yes she is related to the author) is making a hat for each month of the year.  Every two page spread represents a month with Lena modeling the hat she has created.  All of her hats are filled with items you might find in that month: hearts in February, flags in July, ghosts in October and December, well that hat needs a lot of extra room!

Why I love this book:
This is just a fun way to go through the months with your kids and have them associate those months with the big holidays and events that happen.  Karen's art is so charming, colorful and fanciful that it immediately catches a child's attention.  The text is not particularly inspired, but it is the pictures that draw kids to this book over and over again.

Who this book is for:
This is not a board book, so kids who are ages four to six would probably have the most fun with this.  Sadly the last page, which is a foldout, is not reinforced, and ours is almost torn to bits from the number of times it has been opened.

Final thoughts:
I always had the best of intentions of doing an art project around this book, it is just begging you to pull out construction paper and a glue stick.  Sadly my artistic aspirations never seem to line up with my actual abilities, so my kids were cut and paste deprived!