I Said Bed!

 By Bruce Degen

You can totally tell that this is the illustrator behind the Magic Schoolbus series.  But he isn't the same writer.

No matter, this book is fantastic.

 The interactions between the mum and boy are pretty bland, and then the crazy imaginary adventure is full of colours and lines and patterns.  It's really visually appealing.

My daughter can read this book.  It's got tons of repetition and very simple sentences.  Sometimes the characters only say one word each.

Max and Ruby's Treasure Hunt

By Rosemary Wells

My husband hates the art in these books, but I guess I'm just used to it from my childhood.  I don't have any serious attachment to these books, but they aren't bad.

 This one is a treasure hunt.  The clues are hidden in an envelope that folds down!  Exciting!  If only the answers are easy enough for a three year old to get.  But just in case, they put pictures of the answers all over each page.  Kind of frustrating.  But exciting for kids.  There was a lot of standing up and yelling out the answers.

They get a little into rhyming at one point.  Here, they have different things that rhyme with "Hickory Dickory Dock".  Hmmm...  Which of these did the mouse run up?

This is kind of nice, because it's where we're at with learning to read.  My daughter was willing to work out what the words were.

All in all, it's a pretty decent activity/story book.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

 By Dr. Seuss

The 50'th anniversary edition, so it's gold.  It's also the party edition, whatever that means.

I was seriously disappointed in this book.  It's one of the most famous Dr. Seuss books, but I'd never read it and always wondered what I was missing out on.

4 pages about fish and then a lot of rambling.

 Now, the rambling can be okay if it's justified.  And it's justified in this book because it's teaching you to read with phonics.  But the ideas are pretty boring and there's no effort whatsoever to link the ideas together.  And it's SO long.  "Hop on Pop" is aimless and meandering, and to be fair, some of it probably could have been cut, but at least each 'story' lasts more than two pages and the whole thing overall is fairly short.  My daughter likes "Hop on Pop".

She didn't even ask to read "One Fish Two Fish" a second time and promptly forgot it was in the house.  I sent it back to the library after a single read-through.

Plus it's filled with nothing but Seuss' imaginary characters which are annoying after a while.  Some people argue that they all look the same, and I tend to agree.


There are so many early readers out there that are so much better than this.

Fox in Socks

 By Dr. Seuss

This one is a classic.  It was one of my favourites as a kid.  I spent a lot of time trying to memorize as much of it as possible.

 Not all of it is great, and it's really for older kids with a decent attention span.  Lucky that I memorized most of it ahead of time, too, because it's nothing but insane tongue twisters.

The last few pages are all about Tweetle Beetles, which I loved as a kid, but now that I'm an adult, that whole section is totally annoying.

But it's a rhyming phonetic book, so we read it all anyway.

Friday Post - Magna Doodle

 I have this thing about not buying my kids toys ever.  Because, why?  They get so many toys.  They play with them for five minutes apiece.  And then they get this attachment to them and I can't throw anything out without being a serious bad guy.  But my house is a mess!

But we also have this dilemma whereby I can't feed, dress or put the baby to sleep without the toddler crying for attention.  I can get by if I put on her favourite show of the moment, or by handing her my phone so that she can play a game.  I'm not adverse to screen time, but I want to limit it.

We bought her a magna doodle to keep her occupied in these situations, and she's in love.  We hid the stamps from her, because they usually end up lost, and I can't afford to have teeny objects hidden in the living room with a crawling baby.  But I do let her use the magnetic letters that we got her.  I've worked on phonics with her a bit this way, and she loves it because she doesn't have to do printing, but she still gets to place the letters herself.

Sometimes we just make patterns and faces, though.  She loves that, too.

Hop on Pop

 By Dr. Seuss

I go this one because it seemed to be popular.  I never read it as a kid.  I'm pretty impressed.  It's all about phonetics.  It has no weird made-up animals or objects.  It doesn't even have a plot.

 It's a bit disjointed, nowhere near as fine tuned as "Go, Dog. Go!", and some of the drawings are kind of creepy.  But it gets the job done.

I have yet to see another book in this style with a comparable page layout.  Finding good first readers really is the pits.

I don't mind reading this one over and over, but it's long.  Very long.

Friday Post - Mickey's ABC: A Day at the Fair

This is our favourite game right now because it's one of the few games we have that requires only keyboard input.  My daughter knows her alphabet really well, and by playing this game she's gotten pretty good at finding her letters on the keyboard.

 Mickey starts off in his house.  If you press a letter, a word appears and Mickey does a corresponding animation.  The game has Sound Blaster music that isn't annoying and a voice-over that is pretty easy to understand, especially for an older game.

There are words and actions for every letter in his house and separate animations for when he's at the fair.  We like to talk to each other about the pictures and animations as we play together.  Sometimes I'll ask her to find the letter that a specific object begins with to test her on her letter sounds.

Dr. Seuss's ABC

 My daughter loves this book because she already knows her alphabet very well, so she likes to pretend to read it.  The book teaches letter sounds as well as letter recognition.  Some people may take issue with the fact that it introduces all sounds made by the letters, whereas a lot of phonic courses only teach the most common sounds first.

Personally, because we're so far ahead of the curve on this one, I figure if I just expose her to a lot of different books that teach reading, she'll pick it up in the next three yeas regardless of what method they adhere to.

 My husband hates Dr. Seuss for pages like this.  Stupid made up stuff.  And I get it, because I never liked that "Oh the Thinks You Can Think" book.  This one has very few made up animals and objects, so it doesn't bother me.

I also like the layout.  And the verse is altered a little for every letter, so it doesn't get repetitive.

My only problem is that they pronounce Z as "Zee" instead of "Zed". 

But I always read it as "Zed" anyway.  It makes for a delightfully jarring ending.

Green Eggs and Ham

 I kind of loved/hated this book when I was a kid.  The story arc, is pretty good.  How the characters get there is pretty annoying.  The idea that you're going to teach a child to eat that food they hate by convincing them that they're being like the dog with the big hat is laughable.

(My daughter often asks me what that dog's name is and what he is.  I mean, I tell her it's a dog, but it isn't really, is it?)

My daughter loves this book because she's still young and repetitive rhyming books are endlessly entertaining to her.  The rhymes in Dr. Seuss are always pretty good, too.  And the meter matches up properly.  So I can handle it.

This is my favourite page.  I kind of wish I had a print of it to frame and hang on the wall.

Friday Post - The Playroom

The Playroom is a game from the '80s by a company called Broderbund. We played it a lot when I was a kid, and I still have the disks. I used it to teach my daughter how to use a mouse. My daughter couldn't draw well at the time (we weren't worried or anything, as she was on track for her age). She wasn't looking where she was putting the crayon before she starts scribbling. She wasn't going slowly. But she really wanted to draw letters.  She would draw the first two lines for an A, then stop because they weren't anywhere near each other, and then proceed to throw all of her crayons and yell.

I felt that if she had a bit of interaction, maybe she'd slow down a bit and be more careful.

The first bit of success we had was getting her to pop the balloon.  I would click on the drawer to let out a balloon, and then pass the mouse to her.  She would move the mouse around and try to make it touch the balloon, which would make it pop.

After two days of playing this game (a few minutes each day), she could move the mouse to any object and click on it.

There are a lot of mini games in the Playroom.  There's a spelling game where you find letters on the keyboard which doesn't require the mouse.  There's also a counting game that I would play with her, but that she can now play on her own.  Most games have varying levels of difficulty.

Some of the games like the storybook scene pictured here, and another game with a clock, are a little too advanced for us, but will be great in a year or two when her control of the mouse and her ability to understand time will have improved considerably.

It's worth noting that while my daughter has enjoyed this game immensely, and likes to be on the computer with me, she doesn't like to be abandoned at the computer, nor does she prefer computer time to books or puzzles.  So we haven't turned her into an addict or anything.

It's also worth noting that learning to use a mouse did have a pretty big effect on her drawing.  No, she still can't do an A.  But between the Playroom and the Toddler Fun app, she can now draw, not only a handful of simple letters, but also some blobby body shapes with a number of appendages sticking out of them.

Great Day for Up

 By Dr. Seuss and Quentin Blake

I love Quentin Blake, which is probably the main reason I like this book.  It's half decent Dr. Seuss fare.  It doesn't get requested often, but it's reasonably popular.

This is a good pre-phonetic book.  If your child can learn to recognize the word "Up", then presumably they could move on to "Hop on Pop" and learn to read "Cup" and "Pup"

I'm interested in finding other books that focus on memorizing one sound the whole way through.  I haven't found any yet.