When the challenge is to read 300 books in a year, that’s not quite 1 a day. I figured that getting a book a day in to begin with would be a good start though.
So far I’ve read the Mozart Question aloud to the small children. I think I got more out of it than they did. I know it’s about the Holocaust, but it’s also about music and love and redemption and I enjoyed it much more than other Morpurgos that I’ve read. The pictures are great – I have always loved Michael Foreman. One of our favourite early picture books with Big was Hello World.
Then there was Heroes of the City – this runs alongside an app and a tv series. It’s in translation, and there were one or two glitches, but the kids didn’t notice. I quite liked Calamity Crow – and the game to find him on the inside covers is reminiscent of Where’s Wally.
The Polar Bear and the Snow Cloud is a lovely book about friendship. The snow cloud tries his best to make friends for the little polar bear who is all alone, but none of the snow sculptures will play with him, and they all melt. Eventually a second polar bear comes along, and everyone is happy. Simple, but beautiful.
Slinky Malinki is from the Hairy Maclary family. Lovely rhyming story about a cat who is good by day, but a thief by night. Until his greed is his undoing…
This is my book by Mick Inkpen is my book of the week so far. Absolutely lovely – the BookMouse is trying to protect his words from the naughty Snapdragon, who steals letters and bites others, turning a perfectly innocuous book into a Poo. But never fear, with a few OOOOOs borrowed from the scary Ghosts of the Woolly Wolves in the Wildwood, the BookMouse has a plan to sort everything out. I love story books that play with language and this is visual as well as verbal, tying all the aspects of reading together but with a very light hearted touch. Definitely a keeper, might have to source my own copy when this one goes back to the library.
Sunday night – finally got round to telling Smallest the plan for the year. You have never seen such a happy child. She grabbed a stack of books, and handed me the top one so that we could read a new book, and then review the two from the previous evenings. So we read Good days, bad days. Low on words, you might want to skip over the hamster picture. Lots to look at and talk about.
As you can tell, I’m doing the book reviews on a separate blog, Shingle Street, more or less daily. I’ll be setting up email subscription on that sometime this week if you want to follow it, though I’m tweeting and pinning them too.
So, our numeric tally. 6 picture books read 6/300 (2%)
Books bought – 0.
Books disposed of. 0
Library books borrowed – 11.
I’m also trying to persuade Small to take up a Read 52 challenge – I suspect it’s the reviewing that puts him off tbh, so I might negotiate for one review a month and the other titles just listed 😉 I might have bought a book to help persuade him. He’s read two books this week though, so he’s well in line for it. Doing rather better than me in fact!
(His numbers 2 read, 1 bought, 0 out, 0 borrowed.)