What We're Reading This Week

As always, we are reading a bunch of books!  The girls love The Pencil, by Allan Ahlberg:

The book reminds me of Harold and the Purple Crayon, because it is the story of a pencil which draws things.  Everything is just a line drawing until the pencil draws a paintbrush.  Then color enters the illustrations.  When the pencil draws an eraser, the illustrations get fairly silly as various parts get erased.  I keep thinking I should have them do a craft project based on this book, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

Another silly book we love is The Salamander Room, by Anne Mazer.

This book thrilled my girls because the story starts out reasonable and then gets increasingly ridiculous.  A boy finds a salamander and decides to keep it in his room.  As the story progresses, the boy keeps "modifying" his room to accommodate the salamander.

I grabbed this next book because of the title.  I was almost through checking out and did not even open the book before getting it.  But, we just finished a unit on three dimensional shapes and I love getting books that accompany what we are studying.  So, Cubes, Cones, Cylinders and Spheres by Tana Hoban fit the bill.

The book is quite interesting because there is no text, only pictures.  Each page contains a realistic photograph of something which contains a three dimensional shape.  Catherine breezed through this book, quickly identifying each shape.  Sabrina needed some help for most of the pictures.

I have also been trying to get some books which are under Catherine's reading ability, to give her practice and increase her speed.  I don't want her to get frustrated with reading if she is always faced with challenging material.  So, here are some easy readers I got her recently which she liked:

We don't have an pets, so Catherine seems to love any books about animals.  On every few pages, she'll stop and say "Isn't he cute!"  She also enjoys the Biscuit books.

 

This book is set in a classroom, and the children are challenged to count to ten as quickly as they can:

This one is fun because it has a silliness to it, and includes the words "dum, dum, ditty, ditty."  The author, Al Perkins, copies the style of Dr. Seuss.

I hope these books inspire you!