Chapter books.
Sep. 30th, 2008 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI've recently started reading chapter books to Alex.
Her attention span for books is good - for example, she can stay interested in long fairy tales that have a high text-to-picture ratio. So I started keeping my eyes open for longer books that we could read, a chapter or two at a time.
My first thought was The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. We tried a few of the stories, and she seemed to enjoy them well enough. But I realized that the humor in many of the stories is over her head. "Winnie-the-Pooh and the Bee Tree," sure, or the one where he gets stuck in Rabbit's hole after eating too much honey. But a lot of the stories are more subtle. Maybe in a couple of years...
My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, is a book I never read as a child but have frequently seen recommended as a good first chapter book. I picked up a copy on my Wild Woman Weekend, with the idea that we'd go through its 77 pages a chapter or two at a time. Alex had different ideas. We wound up reading the whole book in one big gulp. It really is a perfect chapter book for a preschooler: action-packed, funny, suspenseful and exciting without being scary. The day after we finished it, she lay with it on the couch retelling it to herself, using the pictures to prompt her memory. She'd clearly taken in quite a lot. Fortunately, there are sequels.
Now we're trying out Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We've read two chapters so far, one per night. I'm skipping over some of the more long-winded descriptions. Alex really seems to like it - we've read some of the "My First Little House" picture book series, and so she was excited to have a whole long book about Laura and Mary.
It's hard to think of good chapter books for a 3.5-year-old. Alex may be a smart kid with a big vocabulary, but she lacks the life experience needed to make sense out of most books aimed at older children. And I don't really want to introduce scary or violent themes at this age. Internet discussions of what books people read to their preschoolers have often not been tremendously helpful. (You read The Hobbit to your three-year-old? Really? And The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Either my kid is sheltered and unsophisticated, or your kids are baby geniuses, or you're lying about how much they got out of it.)
Does anyone have any recommendations? I was thinking maybe Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle could come next, but it would probably be good to find some books that were written less than 50 years ago, for the sake of variety.
Her attention span for books is good - for example, she can stay interested in long fairy tales that have a high text-to-picture ratio. So I started keeping my eyes open for longer books that we could read, a chapter or two at a time.
My first thought was The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. We tried a few of the stories, and she seemed to enjoy them well enough. But I realized that the humor in many of the stories is over her head. "Winnie-the-Pooh and the Bee Tree," sure, or the one where he gets stuck in Rabbit's hole after eating too much honey. But a lot of the stories are more subtle. Maybe in a couple of years...
My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, is a book I never read as a child but have frequently seen recommended as a good first chapter book. I picked up a copy on my Wild Woman Weekend, with the idea that we'd go through its 77 pages a chapter or two at a time. Alex had different ideas. We wound up reading the whole book in one big gulp. It really is a perfect chapter book for a preschooler: action-packed, funny, suspenseful and exciting without being scary. The day after we finished it, she lay with it on the couch retelling it to herself, using the pictures to prompt her memory. She'd clearly taken in quite a lot. Fortunately, there are sequels.
Now we're trying out Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We've read two chapters so far, one per night. I'm skipping over some of the more long-winded descriptions. Alex really seems to like it - we've read some of the "My First Little House" picture book series, and so she was excited to have a whole long book about Laura and Mary.
It's hard to think of good chapter books for a 3.5-year-old. Alex may be a smart kid with a big vocabulary, but she lacks the life experience needed to make sense out of most books aimed at older children. And I don't really want to introduce scary or violent themes at this age. Internet discussions of what books people read to their preschoolers have often not been tremendously helpful. (You read The Hobbit to your three-year-old? Really? And The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Either my kid is sheltered and unsophisticated, or your kids are baby geniuses, or you're lying about how much they got out of it.)
Does anyone have any recommendations? I was thinking maybe Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle could come next, but it would probably be good to find some books that were written less than 50 years ago, for the sake of variety.
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Date: 2008-10-01 12:36 pm (UTC)It's about a toy sting ray, buffalo, and rubber ball, who have adventures - like going in the washing machine, or being brought to school for show-and-tell. They deal with a lot of small-kid anxieties in a way that's not patronizing, but still manages to be warm and reassuring, and there are lovely black-and-white illustrations. It's also episodic enough that you can read one story a night and stop there.
I'm on my way to the library, so I'll think of more!
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Date: 2008-10-01 02:09 pm (UTC)I'll also recommend Sara Pennypacker's Clementine books - they're hilarious stories of a girl who does things like try to cut her own hair or write a terrible recommendation letter to prevent her teacher from going to Africa. They read a little like an updated Ramona.