Happy Birthday Dr. Suess! Part I

Last week would have been Dr. Suess’ 104th birthday. From schools making green eggs and ham to the release of the Lorax, people have been celebrating. Why? Because Dr. Suess revolutionized children’s books. He made children’s books much more fanciful with strange illustrations, nonsense words, and rhyming poetry. (To learn more about him, go to Dr. Suess’ biography.) I thought it would be a good time to talk about some of his books, what age groups they are appropriate for, and what skills you can target with them.

Most of Dr. Suess’ books are too long and contain too much text for children in the 12-30 month old range. However, “Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?” is great for this age, especially for

Pinterest, Anyone?

Well, after 2 months of covering our office manager’s maternity leave, I am now getting back to all of the things I left unattended in her absence. This blog would be one of them! Somehow, though, I managed to find time to become a fan of Pinterest in the meantime. If you are unfamiliar with Pinterest, it is a virtual ‘bulletin board’ where you can save links into categories and your friends can follow you and comment on the links and repin them if they want. You, too, can follow your friends and see what they are pinning. Each link is represented by a picture and you can have several boards to organize your pins by category. For example, people often have a recipes board, a craft board, a places I want to go board, etc. So what does this have to do with children’s books and child development you ask?

Thanksgiving Books

So, I went to Barnes and Noble this weekend and they had many Thanksgiving books! If you have a favorite character, chances are they have a Thanksgiving book. Biscuit, Fancy Nancy, Marley, Clifford, and Curious George were all represented.

We have the Curious George Thanksgiving book and I will say it is definitely for an older preschooler (3-4 years of age) as it is really a collection of short stories about Thanksgiving topics such as a parade, cooking dinner, serving dinner, and crafts. The neat part of it is that each story has a pictorial tab on the side of the book, making a table of contents of sorts. So it is a great visual way of teaching older preschoolers about the concept of a table of contents.

If you want to start to teach your younger child about the history of Thanksgiving, you could pick up a copy of “The First Thanksgiving, A Lift-the-Flap Book” by Nancy Davis. The text is simple and rhymes and there are many flaps (more than just one a page) through out.

For a 3-4 year old,

My Favorite Way to Buy Books

I just had an opportunity to buy books my favorite way last night. From Scholastic flyers that our children’s preschool sends home each month! I was able to find some Thanksgiving books to add to our collection, bought a Clifford book for $1, bought a set of social stories for work and did some Christmas shopping. The social stories books were: “Hands are Not For Hitting”, “Germs are Not For Sharing”, and “Words are Not for Hurting”. (What preschoolers couldn’t benefit from those?!) The Christmas presents included a set of 3 Corduroy books for $10 and a Natural Geographic book of dinosaurs with a corresponding dinosaur floor puzzle.

Scholastic books are often deeply discounted (usually there is a $1 book per flyer) and the flyers contain almost every popular

Simple Storybooks

We have talked about different types of what I have called “First Books”: those with simple photos, manipulative aspects such as ‘touch and feel’ or ‘lift the flap’, and/or repetitive lines. Once your child is sitting for about five minutes for a book and appears to listen to you as you name pictures or read short text, then it is time to introduce storybooks. There is no need to stop reading the previously mentioned books (unless of course your child has lost interest in them), but by adding storybooks to what you read, you will be increasing the language concepts your child is hearing, teaching him sequencing (first, then, last), and broadening his knowledge of the world.

So what are storybooks? These are books that

Happy Halloween!!

So I was supposed to write about beginning storybooks this week, but then I realized Halloween is Monday. And if I don’t write about Halloween books this week, then it will have to wait a whole year and what fun is that? Every year at the beginning of October, I pull out our Halloween books and I always make sure to add one or two each year. (Grandma typically adds 1 or 2, too!) It’s always fun to pull out the books we haven’t seen in a year and to take a break from what we have been reading.

But why read Halloween books?

“Off-the-Shelf” Social Stories

Last week we talked about using Social Stories to help prepare children for new situations or to correct undesirable behaviors. There are many children’s books that deal with many of the topics that homemade Social Stories address. If you’re like me and you would rather buy something than make it yourself, these books may meet your needs. However, some children may find them too abstract to generalize to their own life and/or the language level of the book may not be appropriate for your particular child. So you may want to start by checking out these books at the library before you invest in them for your home.

For our very young ones, Leslie Patricelli has written “No No Yes Yes” and “Yummy Yucky” to teach children appropriate behaviors such as ‘drawing with crayons on the wall’-“No No”, ‘drawing on paper’- “Yes Yes” or “Soup is yummy”, “Soap is yucky”. These have very simple text and pictures.

A newer series that we love at our house