A couple of Charlie's favourite books

A couple of lovely little children's books for toddlers.
"Wow said the owl" by Tim Hopgood.

 I'm a huge lover of bright, bold colours and woodland animals so this book caught my attention immediately.

The main reason we bought it (from Waterstones) was because Charlie loves Owls and we wanted to get him an Owl book. Flicking through this in the shop though, I couldn't believe how gorgeous the illustrations were, and just how much colour is packed into this little book.

Each page is flooded with different colours. The illustrations remind me a bit of Eric Carle, which can only be a good thing!

In a beautifully simplistic, colourful way, we learn about:

• Weather
• Night and day: The sun and the moon.
• That owls sleep at night
• That the sun lights up the sky during the day
• Flowers
• Butterflies
• How rainbows are made
• Colours and natural colours in nature.

 This book is also hard back, an obvious bonus when you have a little rough & tumble monkey! I have no fear of letting him toddle around with this book by himself. It's also small in size so is brilliant for packing into his changing bag.

Love the little colour activity at the end too

Little Bear's ABC and 123.



This was a present from Charlie's Grandma & Grandad for Christmas. For a lot of us parents, it'll be a nostalgic trip down memory lane with Little Bear and Old bear who live in an attic. I absolutely loved them to bits when I was little, so of course I want to introduce them to Charlie so he can enjoy them too.

The main reason I love this book is the beautiful illustrations, also by the talented Jane Hissey, they're in a league of their own.  Charlie is too little for the Old Bear stories, so this book is perfect for introducing him to the characters, as well as helping him learn his letters and numbers.

What I also like about this particular letter & numbers book is that it includes bother upper case and lower case letters, and the numbers both in letter form and numerical form.

It also includes the sounds letters can make when put together "Sh, Th, Ch".

In this book we learn:

• The alphabet; from A to Z. There is one simple sentence involving an Old bear character, including words beginning with the relevant letter, under a beautifully illustrated picture. (E.g.  R is for run, Rabbit is running in a race).
  
  
• To count from 1 to 10. There are two pages per one number. One page has a word with the number in numerical form, and the other page has a sentence with the number spelled out (E.g "6 candles" - and then "Little Bear and Ruff Ruff have six bouncy balls)
   with beautifully illustrated pictures, where you can count each item.
  
  
• The lovely characters of Old Bear.
  
  
• Lots of talking opportunities. E.g "What can we see" on each picture (there are lots!).
  
  
• The sounds that letters can make when put together (E.g Sh is for Shadows. Little Bear is showing Rabbit his shadow picture on the wall).

 

Again there's fun little activities at the end.

Linking up to:

World Book Day

I make no secret of the fact that I love kids books to bits - the colours, the adventures, the fun, the fantasy (Julia Donaldson, Eric Carle, Janet & Allen Alberg - wow)... and my little Charlie may only be 20 months, but I couldn't wait to start introducing him to the amazing world of the book-worms and start buying him books.... and now he kind of has stacks!

He's not interested in sitting and listening to a story yet. I try every now and again but he gets very easily distracted when there's too much text and I'm babbling too much! He likes it short and to the point. He still loves his "That's not my" collection and his other touchy-feely books. But his favorites at the moment are books with lots and lots of different themes inside - a different theme to every page; transport, animals, kitchen items, clothing, in the garden, body parts, colours, numbers, food etc with word labels. He loves picking out what he knows.

I had to do something for world book day - and as we've just got Tuff Tray - I could fulfill my first urge to use it! So I filled it with little plush characters, and some of his favourite books. I also brought out the wooden alphabet train that his Great-Grandma bought him - just choosing the letters ABC to begin with. He can count to 10, but he doesn't confidently know any letters yet.  I've seen him start to take an interest in the letter magnets on the fridge, so I bought him his first long ABC book this week which goes all the way to Z.

He dived straight into the Tuff tray and was immediately attracted.... to the train!
Ah- oops. But he did sit in the tray and listen as I held up each train letter and used linguistic phonetics "Ah, ber, ker" and pointed to an item he loves on each page. Ah for apple - Ber for baby - Ker for cat. He was interested for a bit, but then naturally wanted to play with the train, so we'll come back to that. I'm thinking about getting him an ABC sing along CD so he can learn a song to help him remember. And a couple of them educational posters for his room.

He's doing brilliantly with recognising his colours, and he's started telling us which colour spoon (it's really a rounded fork) he wants to use with his meals - which can be 3 at once! He can also recognise some numbers, which are usually 4, 7 and 6 but sometimes he'll shout "TEN" and be pointing to the number 10 on a train timetable screen. Letters don't seem to interest him as much as numbers or colours and that's fine for now.

What Charlie is reading this week

 I LOVE children's books. I was a massive reader when I was younger of the classics like Beatrix Potter and Enid Blyton - then I moved onto collections like Goose Bumps and Point Horror and now I like Psychological Thrillers! But I still love childrens books. I love the bright, bold, happy colours and incredible illustrations, the rhymes, the adventure, the fantasy and imagination, and the fun. I cannot wait until Charlie is a bit older and I can read him "The Hungry Caterpillar", "The Tiger who came to tea", "Hairy Mclairy", "Burglar Bill", "The Gruffalo", "Each Peace Pear Plum", and all the fairy tales and other amazing stories to fill his little mind with adventure and imagination!

The above picture is Charlie with some of his Usborne "That's not my..." book collection by Fiona Watt & Rachel Wells. He's had these since he was about 9 months but he still loves feeling the different textures, and now he's older he can repeat the adjectives and understand what the subject is. He loves them all but his favourites are "Lion, Robot, Princess, Truck, Robot and Train"

Now he's 20 months Charlie is enjoying books a lot more as he recognises what he sees and it excites him. Like most toddlers he loves animals and likes doing the noises and the actions. 

     This is the little "Animal Actions" board book
by Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler.

Peter Rabbit: Nursery Rhyme Time.
Charlie's favorite Nursery Rhyme book with Beautiful illustrations in it from Beatrix Potters Peter Rabbit. He loves all the "action rhymes" at the moment such as "If you're happy and you know it", "This little piggy", and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and toes".  He also loves "A sailor went to sea" but that's not in the book.
It's a beautifully illustrated book.

Dave The Cat by Sue Hendra and Liz Pichon.
Charlie likes it because he likes cats. We bought it because at the time we had a big ginger cat, who sadly died after being hit by a car. Charlie loves looking at pictures of cats because he's always been around cats, and luckily he likes cats!

Charlie LOVES owls. I'd say they're his favourite animal.
And Owl babies  By Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson was his favorite book this week. The story is still too complex for him to understand so I shortened it to a few words per page, so instead of all the owls asking where mammy was, I'd say "And the baby owls said "Where is mammy owl gone?" (which he understands) and then "Aww look mammy owl is back so the baby owls are happy again!"He likes trees too, so he likes that the owls sit in the tree all the way through the book!

 

 The illustrations are gorgeous.

He opened the book again when we'd finished saying "Owls, Owls!"

These are the kinds of books that are the most enjoyed by Charlie at 20 months. They feature a lot of different nouns, verbs and adjectives using different themes.
He loves the "My first words" book by Kindersly Dorling as it features so many bright, clear photographic pictures ranging from animals, to kitchen items, to transport, to bodyparts, to food; and he loves turning the page and picking out what he knows. He sat and looked at it for about 10 minutes last week by himself which is a record!

This is another book that I tried to read with him after Owl Babies.
This is "My first animals" (doesn't state an author)

He was doing fine with it and picked out the doggy and the fish - and then he saw the cat, became really excited and then started shouting "Cleo!" - the name of our cat, and wanted to go and see her, so that was the end of that!I'll be buying Charlie a couple more little sentence "word" books to add to his collection for next week.