Reading is a very important part of my life, and it’s something my toddler loves as well. Some days, it’s the first thing he asks for in the morning. We do read a lot, every day, from the massive pile of books we have at home, but we also go to the library once a week. Here are five 5-star books from this year – the first three are favourites of mine, the last two are favourites of Toddler.
1. Tidy by Emily Gravett
The story of a badger who compulsively cleans and tidies everything. It escalates when fa ll arrives and the leaves start falling… I really liked the story, it’s not often a topic that you see in children’s books. Emily Gravett is one of my favourite illustrators, I love her art style.
2. A Bedtime Yarn by Nicola Winstanley
A super cute story about a little bear who is afraid of the dark. His mum gives him a ball of yarn to hold in bed to fall asleep while she works on a surprise in the next room with the yarn. My mum is a knitter so this story had a lot of meaning for me – I even gave her the book for Christmas (hi, mum!). The art work is lovely.
3. Stolen Words by Melanie Florence
This is the story of a little girl and her Cree grandfather. When she asks him for a word in Cree, we realise he can’t tell her as his Cree words were stolen from him when he was a little boy. So she sets out to help him find it again.
It deals with the consequences of the Canadian residential school system and how Native American cultures and languages were damaged by it. Stolen Words is a bittersweet story, I found it really powerful.
4. Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett
Another book by Emily Gravett. We got this one from the library and Toddler loved it so much he would ask me to read it again and again, sometimes literally fifteen times in a row. So we ended up buying a copy for the house, which is just as loved and we read it quite often.
This one is very simple and more suitable to younger children than the previous books, which have quite a bit of text. The little girl and her monkey are pretending to be animals, it’s great fun to try and guess what they are pretending to be before you see the actual animals.
5. Demolition by Sally Sutton
Toddler loves anything with wheels. So when we found this one at the library, it was love at first sight just looking at the cover.
The story is very simple, it’s about a building being destroyed to create a park. You see plenty of vehicles and are showed how the different materials are sorted and recycled. I really like the ecofriendly aspect of the story, as well as the fact that there are male and female workers on the building site.
The best thing about Demolition, though, is the text. It is written to be read aloud – it rhymes, it has onomatopoeia, the rhythm is great. We also read this one often and several times in a row.
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