More Christmas Books

We have found a few more titles to add to our Christmas reading list.  After all, we have a lot of finding to do if we are ever going to be able to start an advent book pile like this one.

We are love love loving, The 12 Days of Christmas.  It is a simple board book really, everything you would expect from the title.  But the key is to sing it.  H and I couldn't help ourselves.  We sing it at the top of our lungs.  Each page only deals with the corresponding number and gift, but we then flip back through the pages and sing it like you would the actual song.  I would love to learn to sign this book too in ASL (one of our family goals for learning languages.)   But for now it is just, sing it Mama for me.  OK, maybe our kids will remember us a crazy, but at least they are having fun.

Also from our last trip to the library - in the seasonal category, is: What the Little Fir Tree Wore to the Christmas Party and Christmas In Mouseland (Angelina Ballerina).  If you haven't heard of the Little Fir Tree it is a sentimental little book about a little fir tree who longs to wear a white dress to the Christmas party.  It has lovely illustrations and you can almost imagine that all trees talk to each other after reading this one.

Lastly, I stumbled upon I Love Christmas, because I am a huge fan of Anna Walkers books, and it is just as lovely as I expected.  I was sad to give this one away as a gift.  Hmm, might have to pick up a copy for us.

Happy reading!

Floating Princess

 Just a quick note to say that we check out Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated) from the library the other day and are LOVING it!

The story is fresh and quirky with a funny narrative voice and the illustrations are joyful and fun.  So if you love a good princess story, but one with spunk and humor rather and tulle and wicked stepmothers, then this is a good choice.  I particularly like the images of Hyacinth enjoying floating and laughed that her floating was best done in the royal underwear.

Do you Readeo?

We did.

We finally tried Readeo with Mimi.  She read three stories to BB and LF and it went over pretty well.  Aside from LF's usually need to smack the keyboard, that is.  Here are my thoughts on it so far.  Please note: I have no affiliation with Readeo, this is not an ad, just my thoughts on a new way to read.

1) What a cool thing to be able to do!  How amazing is it that their grandmother can read to them from the other side of the country and they can talk about the story and look at the same images.  So cool in fact that BB woke up this morning asking if Mimi was going to read him another story.

2) Set up was pretty easy.

3) The book selection seems fairly good.  We don't have access to all the books at the moment as we are only using the free trial, but I can see all the titles.

4) It was a little difficult to start the first "bookchat" - we ended up starting simultaneous chats and could hear but not see each other.  But we figured that out pretty quickly.

5) The pointer tool isn't that great.  It is too faint and I think BB had trouble seeing where Mimi was pointing, but I really liked the idea so that you can discuss particular things in pictures or point to particular words.

6)  I like the layout of the page - Book centered above and video chat windows smaller below.

7)  The text was a bit hard to see, but we were only reading on my fairly small laptop screen.  I think that if we were on a larger desktop screen, it might have been better.  I might even hook my laptop up to the TV screen next time to see how it looks.

In a nutshell. It went really well and BB and I are looking forward to trying it again soon.  Also, Readeo sent out a survey straightaway after the chat, so it seems that they really care about perfecting the service.  (I haven't filled it out yet, but I will) and it will be interesting to see how the feedback is received.