Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Some of the books we read in August

This was our first month of school and we read thirty books! Well, we wrote down thirty books...I think we probably read a good bit more than that because we didn't count the books Levi takes to bed or the books we've already read a hundred times. I just keep track of the books that were new to us or that Levi read and insisted I write down.
Bread and Jam for Frances falls in that second category. Levi reads this one all the time and Brenna loves it too. I'm especially fond of the descriptions of food...the lunch her mom packs at the end is so lovely! It always inspires me to try to make nicer meals (Frances's mom doesn't serve fish sticks!) and it really helps the kids to be less picky!
The Frog Wore Red Suspenders was full of funny poems. Being a Georgia girl, I especially like the one about peanuts! The pictures were funny, too. Levi picked it himself and he read it several times - always a good sign.
I loved Little Farm by the Sea. Beautiful pictures and I loved the way the family pulled together to do farm chores. It was a neat introduction to seasons, too.
As part of our history study we read One Small Blue Bead and it was very good. I wanted to avoid any discussion on evolution for right now and since the drawings in this one looked a little like Neanderthals I was a little concerned, but the book doesn't mention anything like that. It actually led to a great discussion about the Tower of Babel (check out this book on that) and how in a few generations, people could have come to believe they were the only ones on Earth. Also, the young man in the story shows a real servant's heart and that impressed me:)
Another history book, Seeker of Knowledge, was a very good story. Well worth the read when I overheard Levi telling his granny about the Rosetta Stone! It was inspiring to read about Jean-Francois Champollion's passion for his work.
The last book we read for our list was Brenna's favorite. If Everybody Did is a very funny look at what would happen if everyone had bad manners. The kids were cracking up over the very simple black and white drawings (we checked out the older hardback copy from the library).
Now I have to plan a day to take them out for a pizza lunch and decide on a shape for our September reading window. I'd like to use apples, but do I really want to cut out 30 or 40 apples? But I do have a lot of red construction paper....

1 comment:

Project31_livehappy said...

Those books all sound so good. I'm always on the lookout for good books to read. I'm going to see if my library has any of them. Thanks!