Friday's Book Basket

Welcome to week two of Friday's Book Basket!  This week, we have a lovely version of The Ugly Duckling to share with you!  Retold and illustrated by Rachel Isadora, it is set in Africa.  E and I loved looking at all the different animals that lived on the farm - giraffe, lizzard, meerkat, monkeys.  The Ugly Duckling grows up to be a black swan!  I always loved looking at the black swans at the zoo when I was a kid.  The illustrations are very colorful and remind me of Eric Carle.  We've had some good conversations about speaking nicely to other people, and how it feels to get your feelings hurt as a result of this book. 

One of E's favorite books this week was Rainbow Fish and the Big Blue Whale by Marcus Pfister.  We love the Rainbow Fish books around here.  Yesterday, E told me Rainbow Fish was one of her favorite things in the whole world!  I guess that's a pretty good endorsement.  If you haven't happened to read any of these books yet, start out with The Rainbow Fish.  After that, there are a bunch of adventure stories featuring the same characters, and this is one of them.  I love that the author uses lots of different words.  The fish were terrified of the whale, they ate krill, when they were angry they spoke hostile words (the book is about an argument).

 
Babies by David Bedford and Leonie Worthington is a cute, simple lift-the-flap book.  We got it because of the meerkats on the cover.  E has a thing for meerkats.  It's a simple poem about what different baby animals do.  E loved to pretend to dress herself in the meerkat's swimming suit (does anybody else's kids do this?  Hillarious!) and play the fox babies' maracas and tambourine.  This week we just read the book and enjoyed the pictures, but I can see it as a good jumping-off point to learn about these different animals (especially the turtle babies, who "know the way back").