For many children the school year has just begun. I thought finding some books about school would be a good way to start off the new school year. Each of these books looks at school from a different perspective as well as at different levels. I hope your children enjoy them. “Sam Goes to School” by Mary Labatt is a good book for beginning readers who have a basic vocabulary. Some words may be difficult but a parent helper can get kids through these words. Sam is a puppy who hops on a school bus and gets smuggled in to school. Sam wants to be with the children and wants to learn too. But Sam gets in to typical puppy mischief with the paints, books and papers. Marisol Sarrazin does a nice job illustrating this early reader. “I Was a Third Grade Bodyguard” by Mary Jane Auch is a funny story about a boy named Brian who gets to bring the class chicken home for vacation. Brian’s dog Arful is not happy about this and gets even more unhappy when Brian tells Arful to guard the chicken. Tallulah is a chicken with an attitude and she gives poor Arful and Brian a terrible time. Brian learns a valuable lesson in this book – class pets aren’t always fun to watch over vacations! This is a great book for kids looking to read chapter books. The vocabulary is simple enough to follow and the story has plenty of humor. Plus, Arful speaks “peoplespeak” with Brian and his two friends. Pretty cool! Finally, for the middle school reader, I would locate a copy of “The Last Best Days of Summer” by Valerie Hobbs. This is a great book about the normal middle school fear of popularity. How do you become popular? Doesn’t everyone want to be popular? What would life be if I wasn’t popular? All these questions swirl around in 12 year old Lucy’s mind as she gets ready to visit her grandmother at the Lake before school starts. Lucy had helped a neighbor over the summer whose son Eddie has Down Syndrome. Eddie adores Lucy and she is torn between liking him as a funny and sweet friend or shunning him because he was different and her friends laughed at him. When Lucy arrives at her Grams house she learns fairly quickly that her grandmother’s memory is going and she sometimes isn’t sure what is going on. By the end of the book, Lucy has learned she would rather have many kinds of friends in school rather than just be popular. Her friend Eddie turns out to have many friends in middle school as well. She also learns to accept that her Grams has Alzheimer’s and that she will always love her. Happy reading!
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:12:45 +0000
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