Books for Pre-readers to "Read"

Bean has been a little jealous of big brother learning how to read and demanded that I teach her to read. Since she only knows a few of her letters, she just isn't ready, but we did find a solution that makes her happy. Books with no words! She "reads" them by describing the pictures on each page.

Rainstorm
by Barbara Lehman


The Surprise
by Silvia Van Ommen

Portside Pirates by Oscar Seaworthy

A fun book and it includes a CD with a song version of the main text. It also has several pages with interesting pirate facts!

Tomie De Paola

We ran across a biography of Tomie De Paola in our Pebble Books and he has the greatest illustrations. We have taken out a few of his books and are enamored! We have read Strega Nona, Tony's Bread, and Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile. We will most certainly be reading more!

Nancy Drew

A couple of months ago, Kitty Daddy rented the new Nancy Drew movie from the video store*. Just for kicks, I put one of the original Nancy Drew mysteries on hold at the library. I figured that we would read a few pages, get bored with it, and move on. Boy, was I wrong. We have been reading a chapter a night, sometimes two, occasionally another chapter or two during the day. We are about a third of the way through our third Nancy Drew book now. Nancy Drew has even found her way into Bug's imagination and stories. When we went to the Alpaca Festival, he was carrying around a program and telling everyone he met how he was reading it and it was called "Alpaca Adventures" and how the alpacas met Nancy Drew. Apparently, the mystery novel junkie gene has been passed on!

* Quick and dirty movie review: Meh. Longer version: it was a cute movie, but didn't have much to do with the original series, other than a little good natured fun-poking.

Canterbury Tales

A few weeks ago we found a retelling of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the kid's section of the library. Never having read the original, I can't speak to the quality of the retelling, but the were a fun read anyway. I may have to find a copy of the real Tales and muddle through the Middle English to satisfy my curiosity.

We <3 Pixar!

Since we are watching The Incredibles for the ten zillionth time since Christmas, I thought this would be timely. We really like Pixar movies. And, unlike some kid flix, "we" actually includes me. We actually own four of them: The Incredibles, Cars, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. We have watched Cars so many times that I think I have it memorized, and, oddly enough, I still don't mind watching it again. May I confess? I am madly in love with Guido. Peet stop? And the soundtrack is very cool, too!

I think what I like best about the Pixar movies is that they are fun and engaging and the kids love them, but they are also clever and sophisticated enough to keep adults engaged. Granted, not that watching movies over and over is the most incredible intellectual stimulation, but when we "watch" movies, the volume is usual pretty low and Bug and Bean just keep playing (they are both building lego creations right now). I am trying to reduce the amount of time the boob tube is on, but I object less to TV as background noise than I would if they were sitting slack-jawed on the sofa.

Good Knight

We had one of these out from the library a while back (Take Care, Good Night) and thoroughly enjoyed it. We had a whole bunch of stuff on hold, so we didn't check out any of the others right away. However, with working on getting the kids outfitted in medieval dress-up, I was looking for some knight books and ran across these again. We have Happy Birthday, Good Knight, Get Well, Good Knight, and Take Care, Good Knight out from the library right now and Good Night, Good Knight is on hold. Cute pictures, fun stories...what's not to love?