It's been another busy week with holiday visitors and New Year's Eve, but we've been doing some reading so I thought I'd share some of the kids' favorites this week.
C has continued to read The Cat on the Mat is Flat
. I renewed it from the library since we're only about halfway through it. He's doing great though. It's really helping him get used to sounding out words, and it's introducing him to a lot of new words as well.
We also pulled out an older book called Pompeii: Buried Alive
by Edith Kunhardt Davis. This is a book I had gotten for C when he was interested in volcanoes. Unfortunately, it was a bit too detailed and it scared him, so we put it away. This week, he was watching a program on the History Channel that talked about Pompeii, so he wanted to read this book again. The book is Step-Into-Reading book, level 4, so he cannot read it himself yet. It has three chapters. The first talks about what the different people are doing before the volcano erupts, giving a nice overview of the customs of the time. The second chapter goes into detail about the eruption, including talking about the ash falling on people and burying them alive. The third chapter is about later years when Pompeii is rediscovered under a modern town. It's actually a very good book for teaching about Pompeii. It's just a bit too scary for some kids. 
We got M two new princess books for Christmas. The first is Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Princess Aurora is M's favorite Disney princess, so she's loving this book. It's the whole story of Sleeping Beauty per Disney. We have other Sleeping Beauty stories and they all seem to have differences. In this book, Princess Aurora is cursed by the evil fairy, so the good fairies take her away to live with them in hiding. She returns to her home on her sixteenth birthday, where she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls asleep. The good fairies then put the rest of the people in the castle to sleep so they're not upset about the princess. They get the prince to slay the evil fairy who has turned herself into a dragon, and he kisses the princess and everyone wakes up.
The second princess book we got M is Hoppily Ever After (Disney's Princess and the Frog)
. I picked this one up at the store for M and am disappointed in myself for not looking at it carefully. Unfortunately, this is not the entire Princess and the Frog story. They are frogs throughout the entire book. M was not happy about this. The first time we read it she asked where Princess Tiana was. She rarely asks me to read this book. I am heading out to the stores soon to buy her the Little Golden Book version that tells the whole story of the Princess and the Frog.What have you been reading with your children this week? Hop on over to Mouse Grows Mouse Learns to share!
by Kathryn Stockett (
by Suzanne Collins (
by Alan Brennert (
by Edith H. Beer and Susan Dworkin
by Suzanne Collins (
by Stieg Larsson (
by Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow
by Ranya Idiby, Suzanne Oliver, Priscilla Wagner
by David Baldacci is written in two sections: Tom has to take two trains to get to LA, so each section of the book covers a different train ride. Many of the characters continue on the trip from one train to the next with Tom, so their stories continue as well. I have to say I liked the second half of the book much better than the first. The first half seemed to be devoted to introducing all the different characters and talking about rail travel. It was very slow and not very exciting at all. Perhaps someone who has a strong interest in trains would find this section more interesting than I did.
by Lauren Thompsom
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
by David Sedaris