Great childrens books

We come across a lot of books during our day, but very rarely do I find one that makes me think "wow, I want to buy that one to make sure we have it on hand to read again.".

This week I found two!

Michael is doing a unit on Dinosaurs so we have been reading a ton of those. Most of them are a lot alike and a lot of them are just down right boring or aimed at older kids. This one is the exception. Written by Kathleen V. Kudlinski, it takes ideas that we used to have about dinosaurs and shows how those ideas have changed over time with new information. Far from a dry book, it eludes to the scientific process, hypothesis, and the fact that it is OK to sometimes not get things right the first time. Both Michael and I agree, this is a terrific book! By far the best dinosaur book we have read yet!

We have read another of David Lunbars books, "Hidden Talents". It was a great book although it was definetly aimed at the "tween" group. But we liked his style of writing so much we checked out some of his other books. Among those was a treasure by the title of "Punished". It tells of a boy that gets caught running a library. As part of his "pun"ishment he is given the annoying habit of only being able to speak in puns. To break the habit he must accomplish three tasks involving finding oxymorons, anagrams and palindromes in his daily life without help from others. An incredibly cute and humorous book, it had all of us paying attention to what would happen next. Each night story time ended with a groan as the children always thought we ended at a good part. It is a fairly short chapter book and will have you thinking of and finding some of these literary tools yourself!