Tuesday, July 27th: Reading Day!

We read a lot today and I also let Monkey watch his favorites...Blue's Clues and Curious George.  I love DVR and will totally miss it when we move for hubby's grad school!  Guess I better buy the DVDs soon!

We started by reading about the Letter M.

We discovered a series I think we'll really like at the library.  It's the Sound Box series.   We started with
My "m" Sound Box by Jane Belk Moncure.  It uses rebus (or symbols/pictures with words or in place of words) to help get your child involved in the story.  Our first book we read with this method was Benny's Big Bubble.  We read it tons.  Monkey kept gravitating towards that book.  I ended up buying it for him because he loved helping me read so much.  It took him a few times through to recognize all of the words but that book also comes with flash cards to help you child identify the word and to help them see what it looks like.  Back to the book we read today though.  This book was great and had a list of the words with pictures in the back.  That's what we read before reading the book.  Monkey enjoyed helping me tell the story-he especially loved the monkeys in the story!

The other "M" book we read today was Muhammad's Monday and the Letter M Alphabet Friends by Cynthia Klingel and Robert B. Noyed.  It also had some rebus in it.  This is also seems to be a fun alphabet series.

After reading our M books we read Marley & Me: Marley to the Rescue! (an I Can Read! Level 1 Beginning Reader).  We said "mmm" after every word that began with an M to help Monkey learn the M sound (we're BIG fans of Leap Frog's Letter Factory).  I thought it wasn't as well put-together as most of the I Can Read! books so we won't be purchasing it but it was fun to borrow from the library to read together (the story seemed a bit choppy).

Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel (also an I Can Read Book) was our next book.  Monkey thought the stories were funny.  The story was that a daddy mouse was putting his 7 babies to bed so he told them 7 stories-one for each of them but they couldn't make a peep after he finished.  The stories were silly and Monkey had some giggles.

Monkey started getting antsy so we read Morris and Boris at the Circus which I thought he'd get a kick out of but it was too grown-up for him to understand.  Maybe in another 6 months-year.

Monkey loves dogs so we then read Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon (perfect for a Fall or Halloween theme-that's why I'm adding the label to this post).  It was a fun book and Henry and Mudge continue to be our favorite dog/boy pair.

We also picked up My Dog, Buddy by David Milgrim (the Amazon link SAYS it's a level 2 but it's totally a level 1 reader).  We enjoyed it and the simplicity of the book and are adding it to our wish list.

Then it was time for the actual book of one of Monkey's favorites The Tooth Book by Dr. Seuss.  He has the board book (which he calls "Teeth Book"-the board book is condensed and starts with the "Teeth, you find them everywhere..." page) and has loved it so much he's ripped parts of it to shreds (yes that does mean he loves it-he only rips his favorites apart and then cries when we can't read them any more-he's no longer allowed to have books in his room because he's quite destructive).  We enjoyed the full-length version.

Monkey is also fascinated with ears which he calls "Glee-doughs" (NO idea why-he pronounces everything else so clearly except for hair which he calls "Wee" and our Wii which he calls "Amy").  We had to get The Ear Book by Al Perkins because of that.  The cover of the one we borrowed looks different but I assume the text inside is still the same.  It was a really fun and cute book.

We finished with another rebus book, Dog Wash Day by Maryann Cocca-Leffler (an All Aboard Reading Picture Reader).  It was also a fun book and we plan to read it again.  Monkey wasn't too interested in it at this point because an hour of reading is about the maximum we can do.