Jumpstart, which is headquartered at the Children’s Museum in downtown Boston, originally began at Yale University in 1993 when a handful of college students volunteered to help preschool children from low-income backgrounds with language and other skills. Thirteen years later, the organization has 3,100 mentors serving 12,000 preschoolers, according to senior director of external affairs Katie Rahm, who notes that Jumpstart is now in 19 states.

Recently Jumpstart began fine-tuning its college mentoring model and adding older volunteers, ages 55 and up, who are willing to devote 15 hours a week to take Jumpstart classes, work one-on-one with a preschooler and assist in her or his classroom. Still, the vast majority of mentors continue to be college students, and both AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America are national sponsors, along with American Eagle Outfitters, Pearson and Starbucks.

One thing that hasn’t changed, Rahm says, is Jumpstart’s goal of erasing the school readiness gap between low-income children and other kids by providing supplementary early education. About half of the preschools that Jumpstart works with are operated by Head Start.—Judith Rosen  

A Place Called Kindergarten by Jessica Harper has the sweetest pictures by G. Brian Karas [Putnam,
0-399-24226-0]. The animals in the barn wonder where their friend Tommy can be. The dog has the inside scoop—he’s gone to a place called Kindergarten. They are excited and worried at the same time and keep a watchful eye for his return. This story has a great perspective and is different than the run-of-the-mill “off to school for the first time” story. Karas does a fabulous job (as always) making the animals seem just right. I love this book and I think every kindergartener should have it! It makes kindergarten and learning the happy events they can and should be.

"Kids are cooking," says Antonia Markiet, senior executive editor at HarperCollins Children's Books. "They are a really key part of Emeril's audience." And they get their parents to buy. Emeril's earlier children's cookbooks have had healthy sales: Emeril's There's a Chef in My Soup: Recipe for the Kid in Everyone (2002) sold between 200,000 and 250,000 copies; Emeril's There's a Chef in My Family: Recipes to Get Everybody Cooking (2004) sold 300,000.

Although most children's cookbooks are written by adults, two of the bigger titles this fall are either written by or with the assistance of children. Rozanne Gold, for example relies heavily on young sous-chefs to test the recipes that went into Kids Cook 1-2-3: Recipes for Young Chefs Using Only 3 Ingredients (Bloomsbury, Oct.), illustrated by Sara Pinto. According to Bloomsbury USA associate publisher Victoria Wells Arms, Gold found her head sous-chef dressed in chef whites and surrounded by books at a Manhattan cookbook store. Others were the children of friends, and even illustrator Pinto's two young children helped out. The kids comments are woven into the text, like Danielle on Warm Banana Tart: "This recipe will make you feel like a pro."

What makes this project so close to the artist's heart is the fact that decades earlier, his great-grandmother, Grandma Moses, illustrated this same poem with her folk art, when she was well into her 70s. Will Moses has cherished childhood memories of reading that version of The Night Before Christmas every Christmas Eve, a tradition that he has continued with his own family.

"There are certainly a lot of memories associated with the reading of the story every Christmas Eve, both when I was young and now with my own kids," he says. "Also, I remember the stories of Grandma painting some of those paintings and how she was in the very late stages of her life, and there was quite a bit of concern on the part of the publisher that Grandma would not live to finish the book. And then too, over the years, so many people have told me that reading that book had been a tradition in their families and how the memories of their Christmases were founded in the pages of Grandma's version. All of this went in to making The Night Before Christmas a special and fun book for me."