What are you reading right now with your kids? What are you reading right now by yourself? Do you ever find yourself feeling like this? I finished a string of books that I loved. I read What Would Mary Berry Do? by Claire Sandy and then a couple of Maeve Binchy books back to back, and I loved all of them. For some reason, whenever I finish a book that I absolutely love, I find it hard to start something new. What should I read next?
Here are three books that we are going to read with our kids this week: Babies in the Bayou by Jim Arnosky, Manners by Aliki, and Underwater/Underearth by Alexsandra Mizielinska.
Aliki is so in tune with how kids think, and her books speak to kids in a way that engages them completely. Her book on manners is structured in a genius way. Instead of lecturing kids about sharing, saying please/thank you, and other common topics that I end up having to remind my kids of over and over (all the while cringing for sounding like my mother), Manners is set up with comic strips illustrating different scenarios and how to handle each one. No lecturing! No kids tuning out lecturing!
Here's one that my youngest son experiences a lot - a bigger kid (usually his older brother) comes up and stomps on your sandcastle/knocks over your block tower. What do you do? How do you handle it? Manners gives kids real world answers all while building social skills like empathy and compassion.
Babies in the Bayou by Jim Arnoksy brings us into the wild world of nature and shows readers what animals live in the bayou habitat. A bayou is a marshy bay body of water that plays home to alligators, ducks, turtles, snakes, and fish. The bayou in the book is teeming with cute babies of all different species.
Underwater/Underearth is two books for the price of one. One side is devoted to creatures and natural habitats under the ocean. Anything and everything you have ever wanted to know about sea creatures can be found in the text and super detailed illustrations of Underwater.
Flip it over, and you have Under Earth, a whole new book! Under Earth talks about creatures in nature that burrow underground to make their homes like foxes, prairie dogs, and rabbits. Under Earth also illustrates what archaeologists do at a dig site as they look for ancient artifacts left behind under the dirt. The pictures in this book are awesome, and the book itself is a super-sized, jumbo volume.
What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments!
