Read Aloud Thursday (October 2015)

While we’ve started reading some paper-page picture books together, this month we happened to like a selection of board books best.

For reading together, that is.

If Tirzah Mae’s reading to herself, she prefers to turn paper pages – just like the pages she sees her mama reading as mama reads to herself :-)

Little Green by Keith Baker

A fortuitous find in the library’s board book baskets, Keith Baker’s Little Green has a little boy painting as a little green hummingbird flits this way and that outside his window. There are lots of motion words and lots of words describing the little bird’s path: zigging, zagging, coming, going, stopping, starting, going in curliques. The colorful illustrations are fun to peruse, and the faint white path of the little bird is fun to follow with one’s finger. Tirzah Mae and I enjoyed all the “-ing” words piled on top of one another, the illustrations that lend themselves well to action, and the bright colors which lighten the already-starting-to-get-dark-too-early days.

Freight Train by Donald Crews

This little board book was recommended by the authors of Baby Read-Aloud Basics for Tirzah Mae’s “babbler” stage – and we are sure glad it was.

The freight train is rainbow-colored, starting (at the end, which was weird) with a red caboose and working its way to a purple boxcar right before the black tender and steam engine. We learn the names of a variety of different train cars – and then the train starts moving. We see the rainbow colors blur into one another as the train goes past cities and over trestles and…

This is a very simple book, but elegant – and fully deserving of the Caldecott Honor it received in 1979.

Boats Go by Steve Light

This atypically-sized board book was probably Tirzah Mae’s and my favorite book this month. Each two-page spread contains a boat – and how it goes (that is, what sound it makes). It starts with the fireboat “Whee whee. Whee-whee. Whee-whee.” and ends with a gondola, which sings “O sole mio” :-) The author does a terrific job of writing the onomatapoeia so that a mother (who doesn’t feel particularly confident about replicating the sounds cold) can read them with a reasonable facsimile of the real deal. The illustrations are varied and beautiful, with lots of bright colors (I really enjoyed how the water was represented differently in almost all of the pictures, which I believe were painted with watercolor.)

Of course, moms who don’t want to simply make boat noises have plenty to talk about here. There are tugboats and cruise ships and submarines (a yellow one, which always causes this mama to burst out into unscripted song) to talk about, and even more.

I highly recommend this particular book.

Check out what other families are reading aloud at Read Aloud Thursday at Hope is the Word.