May Family Book Review and Summer Reading Tips
This month’s featured book is a chapter book called Night Buddies, Impostors, and One Far Out Flying Machine written by Sands Hetherington and illustrated by Jessica Love.
Since school around Louisville is letting out for summer, I thought I would highlight a longer read because a lot of LouFamFun families have older kids as well. My daughter (10) read this book recently. It was a funny, quirky read about nighttime adventures when kids are supposed to be asleep. As a parent, you probably get the line “I can’t sleep” a lot from your children. In this tale, the main character, a boy named John, is having one of those sleepless nights and as he’s tossing and turning and staring into the dark, he meets (of all things) a red crocodile. More red crocodiles start appearing, and it’s up to John and his friend to fight off these impostors and get back to bed. Like froyo? Try pineapple cheesecake, a flavor that is found in a never ending supply throughout the story. If your child likes off the cuff stories centered around adventure and fantasy and have a comic book similarity to them, he or she might like this one. You can order this book here, through Louisville’s local bookstore, Carmichael’s. You can also follow Night Buddies at Adventures After Lights Out.
Summer. Books. Reading. Sound familiar? It’s summer reading time! It gets harder and harder to finish those summer reading logs as your kids get older. You want them to read at least at or above their grade level and challenge themselves over the summer. They just want to romp out in the yard, sleep until 10am, and bask in the sunlit pool or sprayground all day long. The system that I set up for my daughter last year really helped. We compromised and I let her pick out 6 books, and I picked the other 4. (Kids have to usually read at least 10 to enter into summer reading programs.)
The six books she picked out were whatever she wanted. They had to be grade level appropriate and chapter books, but she flew through a bunch of fairy series last summer. The four I picked out were either classics, such as The Magician’s Nephew from Chronicles of Narnia, and 3 others from the Newbery literary award lists. (I chose these because I like to read them as well!) We got two copies of these type of books and each read them, then we could discuss them and that created some fun time together throughout the summer.
This summer we’ll probably do the same compromise. I think she will make more choices like the classics because she is starting to get pretty bored with the same old plot lines and characters that she finds in all of the series. She is really into comics and manga this year too, and I will introduce her to some of these formats that I think she will really enjoy.
By guest contributor: Erin
