Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months

It's time for our Word of the Week feature here at LitLad. Here's how it works: Every Sunday the boys and I read a book from which they pick their favorite-sounding unfamiliar word. They each write the word that night and we try to use it in conversation as much as we can throughout the week. According to The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease, "the only words children learn having heard them only once are the words you wish you had never said in front of them."

This week's word is concocting, a verb meaning "preparing by mixing ingredients."

And we're reading Chicken Soup With Rice, in which it says, "In May I truly think it best to be a robin lightly dressed concocting soup inside my nest."

Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months
Author/illustrator: Maurice Sendak
Publisher: HarperCollins (1962)
Source: Public library

In Chicken Soup With Rice, each month gets its own poem about chicken soup with rice and a picture to go with it. The little boy in the book imagines how he'll eat or serve chicken soup with rice for each month of the year: He eats it while sliding on ice in December and swimming under water in July; in June he pours chicken soup over his roses to pep them up; and he imagines himself as a whale spouting hot soup in November. All we need now is the song by Carole King to go along with the book.

Tintin's note: My favorite part is when the boy was eating chicken soup with rice with a snowman who was eating cake.

Johnny Boo's note: It was good and I liked it so much that I freaked out. I recommend this book to people who like freak-out stuff. 


Find it: Amazon, IndieBound