What We Are Reading
Froggy has really enjoyed reading to herself and reading to me this week. Many of her favorites are books written for beginning readers. Our library has several different series and they vary dramatically in the difficulty level and in the quality. The losers (from my perspective- Froggy liked them all) were Big Bird's Copycat Day, A New Roof, and I Can Help.
But the winners were I'm Not Scared and The Tooth Fairy.
I'm Not Scared is a cute story about two boys who take turns sharing what they are not scared of. Until at the en
d they are scared and run and climb into bed with the dad. The pictures are bright and the text is repetitive without being condescending.The Tooth Fairy is Froggy's pick. I cannot stand it. This would be an example of the condescending text I'm Not Scared succeeds in avoiding. It was hard not to gag while Froggy read it to me. But it did let us talk about the Tooth Fairy who is coming to visit many of her friends.
A big surprise in the independent reading catagory - Totally Amazing Sea Creatures. This book is not written for emergent readers. It is more geared to the 9-12 crowd. It has an even-handed mix of cartoon drawings and photographs. I think the "teen speak" style of language holds much of the appeal for Froggy. She does not read it like a story but she takes it with her every where and will periodically decide to read a paragraph to us to share the neat interesting trivia contained therein. I love this book and have two more in the series waiting for her when this one runs to the end of its life.
Like I said earlier we still do read to her. Froggy's most requested is Far Far Away by John Segal, one she picked for herself at the library. We seem to be running a pig preference lately. The story is told through a conversation complete with different fonts between the protagonist and his mother as the young pig threatens to run away. The mother's sweet calm dem
eanor is cute. I like the illustration style which is colorful without being overwhelming.The other big winner is one I picked. It is another Jane Yolen masterpiece. We love all her books. Somehow we had missed The Flying Witch until now. In it a young girl uses her wits to escape Baba Yaga. While Baba Yaga appears in many stories and looks different in each tale I was amazed to see her house look exactly the same as in Grandma Chicken Legs.
Come join the reading blog hop over at ReadAloud Thursday ,Feed Me Books Friday and Mouse Grows Mouse Learns,
These look good--especially the last two. It's amazing how "over their heads" they can read when the interest is high, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteWe have the same experience of reduced "reading together" time overall, but Anna still asks for 2 books before her "quiet time" in the middle of the day and two books before bed. We have a problem, however, that she rarely wants to have the same book read to her twice, so now we mostly read chapter books during that time. The last book sounds interesting, since Baba Yaga is so prominent in my own culture. I doubt that Anna will like it though - she is not a big fan of scary stories.
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