Children’s Book Week

Children’s Book Week is this week. There’s no doubt that we’re a family where books reign supreme. We have tons of books of all types for both Ben and Katie. We have books from both of our childhoods (boxes of them) that we’ve been slowly introducing our children to. We started Ben on his first chapter book this week. I decided on Stuart Little in part based on chapter length and in part based on the fact that I think E.B. White rocks.

Ben also loves Amy Hest’s books: Kiss Good Night. This is one of the books that we’ve read to him since he was a baby. He loves the fact that the Mama is forgetful, and that the young bear has to remind her about the “best” part of the bedtime ritual. Ben’s whole bedtime ritual is built around this book and it thrills him that it fits him and he fits it.

We also love: Mama’s Day. There are so many reasons to love this book. It shows a million different babies doing different things and gives attention to all the different things that mothers do. It shows a very simple, natural picture of a mother breastfeeding a baby. I love it because it reminds Ben how much MomMom does for him in a day and he loves picking out different things. One day, we’ll look for the babies sleeping; another day we’ll look for babies fussing, and so forth.

My last unusual book that we love: Z is for Zamboni. P is a hockey fan. P doesn’t expect Ben to play hockey, but he does want him to have an appreciation for it. Ben LOVES this book, so the appreciation that he was looking for seems to have worked out. It’s a different sort of alphabet that focuses on the interesting and the unusual. And the “sound effects” that we do for Lord Stanley’s Cup always crack Ben up.

There are a lot of people discussing books . A few of them are:

BabyToolKit. This is a review of a favorite that they have that we’re waiting for from the library.

No Time For Flash Cards You’ll find a lot of interesting ideas here for craft projects, but what makes this a standout is how she links books to the craft projects. So, for example, the Letter Pizza post gives instructions for creating a letter pizza craft project, but also follows up with three books that involve pizzas as part of the story.

Simple Kids At Simple Kids, Megan is exploring the unsung classics. The books that we love that aren’t part of the traditional canon of children’s literature. So P’s favorite book, Petey the Penguin and the Pink Pajamas would fit in quite well on this list, though it can be frustrating because some favorites are out of print like this one of P’s.