I want to tell you about a blog by a gorgeous and smart work at home mom. Her name is Tracy and her blog is Mom’s Niche Blog.

Her blog covers many areas faced by us moms, like saving money, organizing our lives, and doing the best job that we can to parent our children.

She also has a bi-weekly newsletter full of all kinds of helpful articles for moms, that you can sign up for right on her blog.

And my favorite category on her blog, is – of course – books!

She, and a fellow mom, have done some book reviews – and I love the way the format in which they review the books – you can check out this category on her site here: Mom’s Niche book reviews.

I may be a little biased, ;) but, I hope they tell us about some more great books!

GO READ A BOOK!

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I wonder how everyone handles that? I would love to get a conversation going on this, because, often – I am at a loss as to whether or not I should let my child read a certain book.

Are they ready for it? Is there even anything in it that I should worry about?

When they were younger, screening books was easy – the books were either very quick reads, or my actually reading the book was not necessary, as it was clearly not a book I would worry about. An example being, Little House on the Prairie. Although, I did read about a rather disturbing episode of the show the other day…hmm…wonder if that one is in the book?

There is no possible way for me to pre-read their books nowadays. I read books so slowly, anymore – I am usually in the middle of several books and several magazines and very busy with computer work all at the same time. And by the time I get to bed and get to read, I doze off after a page or two, if I’ve been lucky enough to read that much!

My poor boys would be waiting forever to read books! LOL!

And they devour books like nothing I’ve ever seen! That is one thing this mama bookworm cannot relate to – the super fast reading of a book. Even in my pre-mama days, I wasn’t that fast reading my books. I’d read some every night before bed, and books would take me some time to go through. Occasionally, I would get my hands on one that I just could NOT put down, but, usually, it was a long, slow relationship I had with each book.

Not my boys. Nope. They eat books up like there is no tomorrow! I would never be able to keep up with them!

In fact, the other day I found a really neat website by an astronomer (maybe I’ll blog about it tomorrow…) and Patrick and I were trying to read it together. “Roll up, Mom! Roll up!” Continuously!!

I think part of it is my ADD – I often re-read sentences and eat them up one word at a time, as opposed to one fluid ingestion, you know?

Anyway, so I’ve veered completely off-subject – how ADD of me! ;)

The subject is – pre-teens and teens – how do you make sure they are reading acceptable books?

GO READ A BOOK!

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That is the name of a really great new blog by a stay at home mom of three precious girls. She is always on the lookout for great activities for her girls – fun and educational – and wants to share her finds with all of us. And so, she started Little Fun; Little Learning.

One of my favorite posts she’s made so far is all about some of the great books that she recommends reading to your kids. She actually lists some of my all-time favorites as she discusses Reading with your child.

It really is a great new blog, already filled up with many wonderful resources – you really should check it out!

GO READ A BOOK!

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I send personalized letters to children once a month, and in each letter I write, I tell the kids about a wonderful book. I write two letters – one for older bookworms and one for younger bookworms.

Well, I finished writing my January letters yesterday, and I had so much fun searching for animal books to talk about!

I picked two really great ones, and I wanted to share them with you!

For my younger bookworms, I chose Eric Carle’s Animals Animals. This book looks so great and every single time I pick out a book to talk about I want to go out and get it for my kids! I better be careful and not listen to myself too much, or we’ll be living in a box made of books! Heehee! If I had the means available to me, I would have sooooooooooooo many books! It would be fabulous! Like those libraries in mansions with the sliding ladders…. aahhh…

Well! A girl can dream, can’t she?

Ok, ok, back to the book – it is filled with loads and loads of poetry from many different cultures! From Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, from Emily Dickinson to Rudyard Kipling, from passages in the Bible to Japanese haikus!

And then, of course, there are the amazing and wonderfully colorful illustrations by Eric Carle – most of the animals gracing two pages each! The whale stretches out on four pages!

This book sounds really fabulous! Here it is:


The book I chose to talk about to my older bookworms is The Kingfisher First Encyclopedia of Animals. This book looks so awesome! I know, I know – I already said that about the other one, but, I just get so excited about the books that I find! (Hence, wanting to buy them all!) I mean, really, though – just look at the cover:

Doesn’t that look fabulous? I know, I know – you can’t judge a book by its cover, but, you know what? A cover can definitely draw you in! And draw me in, it did!
The best thing about this book is that it is not set up alphabetically, but, rather, in animal groups – mammals, reptiles, birds, etc. There are two great things about this – for children who are just learning to look stuff up for themselves, this can be a lot easier. Also, this will help children to better understand and learn the classifications of animals. Very cool!

The book also has over 1500 beautiful color illustrations and photographs. And it has one of my favorite features of kids books – those little cross reference boxes to help the children find related topics within the book.

Yep – those are two very good books! They get my bookworm seal of approval!

GO READ A BOOK!

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My mom and my sister-in-law sent the kids my very favorite gifts ever – yep! Books!

What better gift can there possibly be? ;)

One of the books that Shawn got was called, The Black Tattoo.

I haven’t read the book, yet – but, it looks really neat!

And he really enjoyed it. And the part that has me so jazzed?

The cover! Yes, the cover! You open it up and it is a huge poster – merging the arts, you gotta love that!

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