Four on the Shore

 By Edward Marshall

Sometimes these books are under James Marshall.  Because they are both the same person.

Lolly Sam and Spider make up stories on the lake to scare Willy.  They are terrible stories.  None of them are scary in the least.

 Each story is tacked onto the last to try and up the anti.  They're poorly written with simplistic explanations for things.  They're written exactly the way a story would be if it was told off the cuff by an 8 year old.

And it's hilarious, of course.  These books are just as good as anything else.  They're engaging for anyone over the age of four, but they're laugh out loud funny for anyone over 6.

Pinkalicious Soccer Star

By Victoria Kann

Oh wow I hate this book.  Guess who picked it out.

Dad gets the main character a pink soccer ball, and they play soccer against the mean angry girls who only wear black.  They say "Pink stinks!" because they are bullies.

You know, I've got this thing against asking kids what their favourite colour is.  They just say stuff because they hate saying, "I don't know".  And when they say, "I don't like green", like my daughter does, it doesn't mean anything, because there are so many shades of green.  I showed my daughter my new neon-lime-green sweatshirt and she was amazed and loved it, because, actually, she doesn't hate all shades of green.

 This shade of pink, however, is the same shade as Pepto-bismal.  And it's the only shade they use in the entire book.  Colours are exciting and this book about one specific ugly shade of pink that is already heavily marketed to girls is so dumb.

And kind of racist.

The message of the book is, I guess, to believe in yourself, but it gets lost on this weird trip across the world on a unicorn  seeing other girls who like pink.  Because the other message is that it's okay to like pink (like anyone is questioning that).




Look, I like pink.  I wear pink.  Heck, I even dress my son up in pink.  (pink on boys looks so rad.)

But look at that colour.

Of course my daughter loves this book.

100 Things that Make Me Happy

 By Amy Schwartz

This book is great.  The art is cute, the happy things are well chosen, and it's easy enough for a beginner reader to fumble through.

 No sentences!  My daughter is trying to read, but more than two words in a row is way too much work.  This book was great to open at random and read together.

The rhymes work, the rhythm doesn't.  But it isn't supposed to be rhythmic in the least and doesn't have any kind of pattern, so that's refreshing.

Scat Cat

 By Alyssa Satin Capucilli
Illustrated by Paul Meisel

This is a great early reader.  It's full of tons of easy words.  I read it with my daughter and point to the words that she should be able to read on her own.

In particular, she can read "Cat", so she can figure out "Scat".

Basically every animal and person tells the cat to scat except for the cat's owner because he loves the cat so much.


 It has lots of repetition.  The problem I usually find with repetition, though, is that my daughter is smart enough that she doesn't need to look at the words once she's heard the pattern.  She also has excellent memory and it is rare that we can read a book a second time without her already knowing how it goes.

This book had enough material that I can randomly ask her different words every time we read it. 

A la Ferme

 Published by Chantecler

There is no writer credited for this book.  This company seems to still be publishing, but the books are all pretty random and not categorized in levels like the scholastic books are.

It's a real shame, because we love this book so much.

Because it's on a farm, the animals, activities and concepts are all words that we've covered while learning general vocabulary.  There are a few crazy words in there, but that's good.

Little Bear's Friend

 By Else Holmelund Minarik

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

This is a really interesting book because it introduces a human character into a world of animals.  When a children's book brings a human child into a make believe world, it risks breaking the fourth wall.

 The whole way through I'm waiting for the author to slip up and make it awkward, but it's doesn't really happen.  The book continues to have charming, kind and thoughtful characters doing simple things.  It's a great little reader, too.

At the end, little bear writes a letter to the little girl.  I wonder how that will go over with her parents.  But my daughter probably doesn't.

Happily, the adults are never featured.

Bears On Wheels

 By Stan and Jan Berentsain

Not Berenstein, as everyone seemingly used to pronounce it.

This book is amazing!  It teaches basic math!  I wouldn't call it an amazing counting book.  There are better books for that.

 The bears' shirts are different colours and the different vehicles that they ride or drive have different numbers of wheels.  It has 2+2, 1+3, 1+4, 5+5 and a few others.  Nothing incredibly difficult.  It's just a nice visual representation of the concept of adding and is really appealing to preschoolers.

My daughter seems to understand addition and I sincerely believe that this book made a big impact on that development.

Too Many Cats

 By Sindy McKay
Illustrated by Meredith Johnson

This was a fantastic book that I randomly requested from the library because my daughter demanded more cat books.

It's a "We Both Read" book, meaning that the pages on the left have story, and the pages on the right have one or two words with a picture.

 The story is a pretty hokey one about a girl who wants a cat and dreams that she gets ten instead, each a different colour.  It means that it's teaching kids to sight-read colours and numbers instead of learn phonetically, which is okay.  You kind of have to learn both ways, because some of those numbers are impossible to sound out phonetically.

This book was a real hit.  Before I give it back, I think I'm going to photocopy some pages and cut them up for a mix-and-match activity with my daughter. 

Little Bear and the Marco Polo

 Written by Else Holmelund Minarik

Illustrated by Dorothy Doubleday

What a disappointment.  I usually love the little bear books.  They've got tons of repetition, so they're great little readers, and they focus on little bear's character.

This one is all about how his grandfather was a captain of a ship and then settled down and got married.

 There's a bit about the bears of the world.  The rest is typical patriarchal "what is marriage" garbage.  And, whatever, obviously I'm married and have kids, and lots of people are married and have kids, but books about that are BORING.

I don't care what Grandpa bear did.  I want to hear about Little Bear's pretend adventures.  That was what was so great about the earlier books.  (The other 5 books in the series were written 40 years before this one.)

Sendak did the pictures in the original series.  They got a new illustrator for this book, and it shows.   Just what is going on here with Grandpa bear?

No crosshatch, either.  Crosshatch is so, so charming when done well.

My daughter didn't really notice how bad it was, but she didn't ask to read it again, like the other books.

Picture This

 By Alison Jay

This book isn't half bad.  It has a number of people, toys, animals and objects that are hidden in each page.  The pictures weave together and the story is almost circular and encompasses the four seasons.

 The art style is mid to late nineties.  Each page has cracks on it, like it's been painted on an old plate or something.  It was a trendy look at one time, but it's kind of hokey now.

The words are great for learning to read!  So that's kind of nice.  We're getting into 3 and 4 letter words, but a whole sentence is too tricky.

 My daughter is all like, "WHY ARE ALL THE PAGES BROKEN!  OH NO!"

But, it hasn't caused us any more grief than that.  As a basic picture book for a three year old, it's pretty boring.  I think it's meant for someone at least five years old.  My daughter really didn't understand how one picture led to the other.

J'aime la Pluie!

 By Hans Wilhelm

These are Scholastic books from the "Je peux lire" series in "Niveau 1".  There is one sentence per page.  There are many, many books in this series, and they all have very similar sentences with different vocabulary.  Lots of use of the verb "jouer" and words like "attends" and phrases like, "Je sais!"

Plus, you know, it's about an energetic dog.  These are fantastic.

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.

Read With Chirp

 By Bob Kain

We love the Chirp magazines and are constantly getting them out of the library.  I got this out of the library to encourage my daughter to work on learning to read.  It isn't real reading; it's rebus reading.  But it is totally helpful to use when teaching kids to read.

First of all, if nothing else, it teaches kids to read from left to right.  It encourages my daughter to help me read (She loves deciphering the pictures).  Sometimes, if we've gotten far enough into the story, she'll have the courage to attempt a two or three letter word as well.  If there's repetition, which there often is, she can figure out a whole sentence by herself.

I really believe that teaching kids to read has more to do with establishing self confidence than anything else.

In A People House

 By Theo LeSieg, or Dr. Seuss
Illustrated by Roy McKie

Hey, it's a Theo LeSieg book that isn't terrible.  It's a great little reader with some easy to read words, some difficult common words, and a few not-so-common and a fair bit tricky to read words that they should have left out.

 The words for objects are large and printed in red, which is nice.  The rhyming is fine, but the rhythm is off.  It's better than most LeSieg books.

The story is great.  Mouse invites bird inside house.  They explore it and name all of the objects.  The people come home and kick them out.  My daughter really loves this book because she gets the joke (which is very rarely the case).  I'm glad I picked it up.

La Glace

 By Melvin and Gilda Berger

This is a really great book with some basic information about ice.  It's hard.  It's cold.  It can be thick.  It can be thin.

You think I'm being sarcastic, but there's very little to be negative about when the source material is interesting enough and the author decides not to embellish.

For more advanced readers, there's some more in depth information about ice written in bubbles inside the pictures.

This is currently my daughter's favourite book.  She seems to like non-fiction best.  I would like to find more in this series.  Damn Scholastic Books and their unnavigable website!

Bidule

 By Therese Daignault  and Anne-Marie Levesque

Not much to say about these except that they're brilliant.  They can be purchased online in a set.  They contain the verb repeated eight times followed by a different noun each time.  The pictures are decent, too.

All the verbs are the very first most basic ones.  The next series starts in on French phonics, or the méthode syllabique.  We only have these two books right now, but I'm going to order more later in the year.

Scolastic Readers in French

 These books, from the "Les Mots-outils" series are pretty good, but they're random.  They're less for learning to speak French and more for learning to read in French.

I think you're supposed to learn the words by sight, which is ridiculous.  But whatever.

 Some of them, like the one above, are organized by level (you'll notice the A in the top, right hand corner).  The series to the right is organized by season.  Either way, it's a terrible way to organize the books.  I had to read each book to decide if it was at my daughter's level.

The way I'm teaching is by using a picture dictionary, or "Imagier", so that she learns all of her nouns first, and then we're putting together sentences by learning verbs.  These books tend to teach by common phrases, which may contain simple forms of common words, but may instead focus on adverbs, adjectives or prepositions while using a combination of verbs.  I really just want to stick to verbs, first.

These books from the "Les Premiers mots" series were much better for my purposes.  They tend to focus on one verb or preposition while varying the nouns.  My daughter learns the verb or preposition on the first page, and then she understands the whole book on the first read-through.

It's so hard to find these books to purchase them.  Some are on the French Scolastic website.

Frog and Toad

By Arnold Lobel

We got the box set of the Frog and Toad books ("Frog and Toad are Friends" isn't pictured) ages ago when I first found out I was pregnant.  It was an excuse to pick up one of my favourite set of books.

Some of the concepts in these books are just a bit beyond my daughter, but she likes the books anyway.  The conflicts are silly, and are rarely between the two main characters.  Even when they have an argument, it never affects their strong friendship.  How could any child dislike these books; It's a whole series of stories about two characters who are animals and who love each other and do everything together.

The text is big and the wording is very simple and just a little repetitive, so it's a great reader.  The stories are short which means that I don't have to read the whole book before bedtime if I don't want to.  And Toad is a bit of a grump sometimes, which saves it from being saccharine.

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.

Seasons

 By Blexbolex

This is the first Blexbolex book that we ever got.  It still has large text for easy reading, but this book has scenic pictures which means that we spend more time on each page talking about the details.

There's a bit of a narrative to this book, but it isn't necessarily apparent on the first read through, and my daughter likes to invent her own stories.

 Sometimes opposite pages will be related.  Sometimes a scene at the beginning of the book will be developed towards the end.  This is a great book for babies, toddlers and older kids, as the vocabulary is varied and contains some complex ideas.

There are a few pages that are a bit weird for kids, maybe, but nothing offensive. 

For instance, whether or not you believe in hunting trophies, they exist in the world, right?  And until your child is old enough to know better, it's just a deer.