A word of explanation about the silly pie charts on the left. I have been a voracious reader since I learned to read and often go on kicks where I read everything an author I have enjoyed has written. Apparently Bug is going to take after mama. Last spring, we picked up a pile of bug books and ocean life books from the library and several of them were Pebble Plus books, which are published by Capstone press. Bug loved them. I liked them, too. They have big colorful pictures on the left page and a few lines of text on the right page. They are designed for beginning readers, so they are a VERY QUICK out-loud read and we had quickly checked out every one we could find at our branch library. We could go through the stack (a dozen or more books) in very little time, so we read them every day. Pretty soon, when Bug decided he needed a little "quiet time" he would haul the whole stack up to the bedroom and "read" to himself. Very cute. He would page through them, study the pictures, and paraphrase the text from memory. After renewing a bunch of them, I went online and found a list of all the Pebble Plus books so we could get some new ones from other libraries to make parting with the originals less painful. So I am keeping track of which ones we have read in a spreadsheet. There are four subject areas: Science, Social Science, Health and the Human Body, and Animals.
Finding these books and placing holds, we stumbled on the Pebble Books (same publisher, different series) and started reading them. They are smaller, tend to have shorter, easier text, and come in a wider variety of topics. While I don't like them as much as the Pebble Plus, they have been pretty cool when we want some books to go with an activity (like going apple picking last fall, for example).
Between the two, we will often put a half a dozen or so books on hold each week, so we always have a selection of our "star books" on the library shelf. (That's what we call them as most of them have a star on the spine as part of
Capstone's logo.)
Daddy brought home one of the PBS videos from the Building Big series a while back and we ended up putting holds on the other four videos as well. Bug and Bean tended to wander in and out during the videos, but Bug was very interested when I brought the companion book home from the library. We have been reading a little here and a little there about big structures. Especially appealing for a civil engineering type mama!
Around the time of the election, we were looking for some books on government and electoral process and whatnot and I found this book on an unschooling blog (I can't remember whose). It is a collection of essays about the White House and its occupants throughout history. Even I am enjoying it, with my weak and unhappy past relationship with formal history. I am finally learning about and mostly enjoying history, in spite of my history teachers' best intentions! ;o)
Finally, Bug is still fascinated with the human body (as well as bats, bugs, bionicles, mythology, and dozens of other topics that come and go!), so this has been a fun book. The level is a bit over his head, but he still enjoys it and I figure it can't hurt to get acquainted with biology terminology. Heck some of it is over my head, but it's still pretty interesting.
