You Read to Me, I'll Read to You

You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Fairy Tales to Read Together is part of a series that's perfect for read-aloud time. (The series also includes a collection of fables, one of Mother Goose rhymes, one of scary stories...you get the idea.)

You'll need at least two readers for this. One of you reads the red words, the other of you reads the blue words, and you read the purple words together. The colors alternate every few lines.

We've only read the fairy tale volume, so that's all I can comment on. Each fairy tale is a few pages long, and each of you plays the part of one character. For example, in "Jack and the Beanstalk," I was Jack, and The Boy was the giant. Each tale has a little bit of a twist from the original, and the characters always end up reading to each other in the end. Cute, right?

This is a pretty slim volume, and I'm assuming that the others are, too. The Boy liked this one well enough that I'm sure we'll be checking out the others soon.

I'd recommend this for kids at a first grade reading level or higher. And for parents of any age.

You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Fairy Tales to Read Together
Written by Mary Ann Hoberman and illustrated by Michael Emberley
Age range*: 5-8

*Age ranges are very flexible.

Full disclosure: The books reviewed here are books that I own or that have been checked out from the local library. The links in this post are Amazon Affiliate links.

Go to Sleep, Gecko!

We've been reading a lot of folktales lately.

This one's not my *favorite*, but it's pretty good. Gecko can't sleep because the fireflies blink on and off all night, and the blinking keeps him awake. So he asks Elephant, the village boss, to make the fireflies stop blinking. Well, the fireflies tell Elephant that they're blinking because Water Buffalo poops all over the road, and they blink their lights so no one will accidentally step in the poop in the dark.

Yep. Poop. And that's one thing that I really like about this story: it uses the word "poop" without any self-consciousness or joking around. It just is what it is. And that, for some reason, makes me laugh.

Anyway, Water Buffalo has a pretty good reason for pooping in the road (let's see how many more times I can type "poop" in one blog post!), and that reason leads to another reason, and so on. The moral of the story is that everything is connected, which is a good one, but I'm not sure a lot of kids will understand it very well.

Poop.

Go to Sleep, Gecko!

Written by Margaret Read MacDonald
Age range*: 4-6
My rating: 3 stars [out of five]

*Age ranges are very flexible.

Full disclosure: I don't receive any compensation for reviewing children's books--the books are usually just checked out from the local library.

Zomo the Rabbit

It seems like I've been checking out more...um...multicultural books for Little Boy lately. International? Global? I dunno what exactly to call it. But you know what I mean, right?

Anyway, I'm not sure that Little Boy really gets the whole "other cultures" thing. We talk about how a story came from India or China or wherever, and sometimes we look at a map, but at four years old I'm pretty sure he just knows it's from somewhere far away. Good enough.

Part of me thinks I've just been checking these books out for a bit of variety for myself.

Whatever the reason, some of my favorites that we've found have been from Africa. I guess I'm not very familiar with African folktales (except Anansi the spider). Zomo the Rabbit is a fun story, and the illustrations are full of bold colors. Little Zomo wants to gain wisdom, so he asks the Sky God what he can do to get wisdom for himself. The Sky God gives him some impossible tasks, Zomo completes the tasks, and the Sky God grants him the wisdom he wanted.

The only problem I had with this story--and it's not really a problem with the story, it's more a problem of having a four-year-old--is that I wasn't sure how I was going to explain the "Sky God" concept to Little Boy. We believe in God, but not African folk gods. Little Boy didn't question it, though, so I let it go.

Little Boy really enjoyed the illustrations, and older kids would probably laugh at the parts where Zomo outsmarts the other animals. A good little story, overall. And, clicking around the library website just now, I found out that the author has written/illustrated other stories like this one--I'll be putting some of those on hold.

Zomo the Rabbit

Written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott
Age range*: 4-7
My rating: 4 stars [out of five]

*Age ranges are very flexible.

Full disclosure: I don't receive any compensation for reviewing children's books--the books are usually just checked out from the local library.