When we got back from our holiday at the beginning of the month I found myself struggling to find books to read to Rose. She seems to have hit an in-between stage where we have read and re-read lots of the younger chapter books but she isn't ready to move on to the next level. Then I read about the TUAR Picture Book Challenge and Chari and Willa's blog Take Up and Read and bingo! I realised that picture books were the way to go.
Chari challenged Willa to join her in picking 10 picture books each month to read to their youngest children (who are, I think, 10 and 9 - picture books are not just for tinies!). Then she issued this invitation:
Willa and I are hoping to do this every month for this school year.......and we cordially invite all of you to join us. We challenge all of you to choose TEN Picture Books a month....to read to the little ones in your life........or the big ones.......or even to yourself. :) In the first week of each month, both of us will post our TEN Picture Book choices on Take Up and Read. Please feel free to grab the Picture Book Challenge button shown at the top of this post to place on your own blog and link back to us.....with your TEN Picture Book choices
I never got round to posting a list but we did start reading. I asked Rose if she would like books about anything in particular and she wanted animals and countries. Our local library has been closed for a couple of weeks while they replaced the service desk with self-service machines for checking books in and out (end result = chaos if today's library visit was anything to go by), so I dug around on our shelves and did a little Amazon shopping. So here, retrospectively, is our list of 10 picture books for September:
- The Pear Tree: an Animal Counting Book (Meredith Hooper and Bee Willey) - we loved this one, which takes the 12 Days of Christmas rhyme format and applies to the life of a pear tree and the animals that live in and around it over the 12 months of the year.
- Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth (Eric Carle) - love this for the variety of animals and the sloth's wonderful monologue at the end
- The Story of the Creation (Jane Ray) - gorgeous illustrations with lots of animals!
- Noah's Ark (Jerry Pinkney)
- I Love Guinea Pigs (Dick King Smith and Anita Jeram) - one of an excellent series of Read and Wonder books published by Walker Books in the 1990s, good enough that a number of them have republished as "Nature Storybooks"
- All Pigs Are Beautiful (Dick King Smith) - another of the same series
- The Doll's House Fairy (Jane Ray) - an old favourite
- The Mushroom Hunt (Simon Frazer and Penny Dale) - yet another Read and Wonder book
- J is for Jamaica (Benjamin Zephaniah) - this is one of a series of World Alphabet books published by Frances Lincoln (one of my favourite picture book publishers).
- M is for Maple: a Canadian Alphabet (Mike Ulmer and Melanie Rose Popp) - Rose asked for a book about Canada, but this one rather went over her head
I have a pile ready for October and will try to post that list rather earlier in the month!
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3 comments:
Pretty makeover for the blog! I like it :-)
We all still love picture books. There are so many truly special ones out there. We like the Alphabet Geography books, but yes, they to tend to be a bit 'older'.
Our libraries switched to self-check-outs: there is a learning curve, for sure!
Hi, Kathryn! Thanks for joining us!
I love your daughter's themes. So nice that she just what she wanted. :) I love the ABC geography books, too. Even though some of it goes over her head....the pictures are always gorgeous. Isn't there one part of each page for the youngers and then a longer more involved text for the olders?
I really like the idea of the pear book.
We almost lost our whole library system a couple of years ago......thank God they were saved....and now they are even better....at least ours is...plus, it is forever financed now. :) One of the changes was the self-checkout. It took me awhile to get used to it. But now I have realized that it works faster than the computers that the librarians check out with....haha. :)
Cannot wait to see your October list. Getting mine ready, too!
God bless!
I haven't felt up to doing the Picture Book Challenge myself yet. I'm too busy trying to implement various school stuff for Bella. Which doesn't mean we aren't reading tons of picture books; just that for the most part the kids are in charge of choosing --except for my quick grabs off the shelf at the library in between keeping Anthony from rampaging-- and I'm sitting back to let them drive that part of our adventure for now. But I love reading other people's book lists. I can't imagine ever getting tired of book lists.
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