What We're Reading November 20, 2010

We have been reading quite a few books these last few weeks.  There were books that went along with our letter T, fall books, Thanksgiving books plus some others.

We started out this month reading a couple of fall books which I also made fit in with our T lessons.

We read Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert.  I love the drawings of the leaves and the great detail of each individual leaf that she then takes and uses to form, not just a leaf man, but a wide variety of animals and other things as we join the author in wondering where the leaf man may have gone after it flew away.  You really need to check out this book to see how creative the author is.

We also read Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson.  This story is about a sweet, young, caring fox, who is concerned when his friend the tree begins to change in the fall.  He is so concerned as the tree loses his leaves he tries to put them back on.  This story just tugged on my heart watching the lengths the fox would go to help his friend.

You can see the projects we did for those books at my Fall Art post. I figured as our letter is Tt we could make leaf projects as leaves come from trees.

Then we moved on to our real T books.

We read That Train but I can't find it to record the author.  I'll take care of that when I am not falling asleep.

We also read Freight Train by Donald Crews, a simple book in which each train car is a different color.  Not only do the children learn the names of the colors, but they also learn the names of train cars as the train is depicted traveling on a journey.

And we read Big Truck and Little Truck by Jan Carr

In this book Little Truck is learning what he needs to do on the Farley Farm from Big Truck.  They work together with Big Fred Farley and Little Fred Farley to do different chores on the farm.  One day Big Truck has to go to the shop and Little Truck has to learn to do the chores on his own.  Will he be able to get to the market okay?  Will he remember Big Truck's advice? How long will Big Truck be gone?
The girls really liked this book, as did I. I like that Little Truck looks up to Big Truck and learns to do what he is told so that even when Big Truck is not around he can do his job.

You can check out our "t truck" crafts here.

I also found two cute books about the "first" Thanksgiving.

The Very First Thanksgiving Day by Ronda Gowler Greene had beautiful pictures depicting the pilgrims and their surroundings as we are shown the feast day and work our way back to the Pilgrims being in Europe getting ready to come to the new world.  This story reminded me of the poem, The House that Jack Built. On doing some research I discovered this kind of tale is called a cumulative story.

This First Thanksgiving Day:A Counting Story by Laura Krauss Melmed counted from one to twelve with sweet little rhymes each page depicting friendly pilgrim and Indian children for the most part.  The illustrations were very detailed with the addition of a hidden turkey on each page.  

I am linking this up to Amy's blog, Hope is in the Word and her weekly linky Read Aloud Thursday

and

 

over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns