Booking in Isolation

Reading has looked a bit different for us during isolation. Before all the libraries closed I really stocked up and the kids brought home books from the school library too. I was feeling okay at the start of lockdown that we had enough of a stash to see us through. After 6 weeks I was thoroughly bored with what we had, even the really good ones.

Luckily one of the local libraries we use sent us a parcel of reserved books that reignited some enthusiasm (in both kids and mum), including 7 or 8 graphic novels, which is pretty much all Jude wants to read right now.

The desperation for new reading material also led me to purchase a few books for us to keep, which I don’t do regularly, usually the purchases I make go in the birthday box for friends and cousins.

The school set the kids up with Get Epic, which is an online reading site with a fairly good selection of fiction and non-fiction books. A lot of the books are written for educational purposes, ie, learning to read. But we also found quite a few of our favourite picture books to re-read. We found lots of Jon Agee‘s books which we hadn’t read and got to read them. Jude read the entire collection of Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate series on Get Epic and introduced himself to Peanuts.

So here are a few reviews for books we enjoyed during isolation.

Get Epic

Smart Feller, Fart Smeller: and other Spoonerism, by Jon Agee – As a girl, I remember reading Spooner or Later at the school library (I believe it’s now out of print) and trying to wrap my head around the concept of spoonerisms and trying to work out what they all should be.

Freya and I had fun reading Jon Agee’s spoonerism book before bedtime one night and she got totally into the concept despite it not being in her usual wheelhouse. First thing next morning she wanted to re-read the book to try ‘get’ them all by herself. It actually turned out to be quite fortuitous as the next week she has a school-assigned task that was very similar requiring her to play around with the spelling of words by changing the initial sound.

Library

How To Be a Giraffe, by Thea Baker – This is probably the one library book I was happy to continually re-read. Affirm Press just keeps churning out the delightfully kind, quiet, thoughtful books for preschoolers.

The rhyming story centres around a stripey giraffe, Joffrey, who feels on the outs with the giraffes and goes off to find his ‘tribe’. The text is so sweet and so well suited to the 2-6-year-old age group. And the soft, pastel shades of the illustrations are joyful and marry perfectly with the text.

Purchases

Funny Kid Peeking Duck, by Matt Stanton – My oldest turned 10 during the month when all birthdays were canceled. Fortunately, the publication of the next installment of Funny Kid was brought forward to help everyone during isolation. Jude loved it, as expected, and whipped through it in a day. My girls are looking forward to listening to it as soon as it gets on BorrowBox.

Also during this period of being at home Jude has been tuning in to Matt’s new YouTube channel to get tips on drawing and insights into the life of an author. He does drawing tutorials, lets us see his studio and is just a super nice guy. If you’re still at home and are ignoring the specialist subjects lessons your school is assigning (like I totally have been), then sit your kid down and watch a few of Matt’s videos and call it ‘library’ for the week.

A Number of Numbers, by Allan Sanders – I have been trying to stop myself buying this book all year. Alphabet of Alphabets was one of my top 3 books in 2018. I loved it because the kids loved it so much. We spent hours pouring over the details in the pictures, learning letters and words, and having a great time. I have gifted for 3-year-olds because I think that is the perfect age for this book, but younger and older kids will absolutely love it too.

I knew I would buy this book at some stage, but the January release date put it a month too late for my 3 year-old’s birthday and Christmas. I finally gave in and just bought it for no reason other than we needed a change in our book landscape. And the same goes for the next 2 books as well.

You Choose Your Dreams and You Choose in Space, by Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt – We have really enjoyed many of the books Nick Sharratt has illustrated. The Daisy books are hugely loved by my kids, as is the Shark in the Park series. We have had the first You Choose book for a while and I pulled it out to give the kids some inspiration and ideas for their creative writing during remote learning. I finally gave in and bought a few others from the series and they have been a huge hit.

They are a different type of look-and-find book. Instead of a list of items to search each page challenges you to pick from all the images which you would choose. Really they are books full of conversation starters. With so many options I find the kids and I get talking, sometimes staying on a page for 5-10 mins discussing all the possibilities and preferences.

While reading stories aloud to children is so effective in building their language skills, this type of ‘reading’ probably builds a much stronger bond between readers as they learn about and from one another.