MommaReads

Do you have a tradition in your house that doesn’t follow the norm? Tuyet is very worried that her family is not celebrating Thanksgiving the way you’re “supposed” to and it bothers her so much that she is ready and willing so spend her allowance money to make sure her family has a turkey at Thanksgiving. Once her family’s Thanksgiving duck starts cooking and the house is filled with the familiar smells of wonderful cooking she is familiar with, her need for a turkey fades away. Even better, when she returns to school the next week she realizes that her family isn’t the only family who didn’t eat a turkey…there are many ways to celebrate Thanksgiving.

A baby bird has wriggly worms for supper. Yuck! A baby lizard eats a spider for supper. Yuck! All of the babies in this book are eating things that are yucky and not at all what your baby would eat for supper. But what do all of these animal babies think of your baby’s supper? Yuck! An adorable book that has a cute little twist at the end.

At first it seems like this is a cute story about a little girl and her mother going out to pick berries so they can make jam. As the girl is picking berries she comes across a bee which she’s a little nervous about. As the story continues though, the tale shifts a bit and the reader sees the bee’s side of the story as well. It turns out he’s a little nervous about the little girl, too.

This is a cute rhyming book about the seasons a garden goes through starting with planting in the spring, things growing and getting picked in the summer, harvesting pumpkins in the fall and the blanket of snow covering the garden in the winter.

This is SUCH a great book…so much vocabulary and pictures to discuss. It is a non-fiction text with a short sentence or two on each page with great pictures that accompany the pics. Some of the great words that you might want to discuss with your child include: annual, perennial, bulb and tuber. We have had a family garden almost every year for the past five or six years, so this would be a great book for us to read to help us to learn even more. Don’t have a garden? This book might make you want to have one. 🙂

Sarah and Grandpa work together to plant and care for their garden. One day, later in the summer, Grandma invites Sarah over for lunch made out of their garden.

Stewart has a sweet tooth that talks to him and makes Stewart do things he knows he really shouldn’t do, like diving into a wedding cake before it has been cut, begging candy off people at the movie theater and eating ALL of the Easter candy all at one sitting. Stewart knows something has to be done, so he tries feeding it peas, but the sweet tooth is NOT happy. He tries brushing it and flossing it. The sweet tooth is so angry he gets revenge on Stewart. The war is not over though and Stewart goes to drastic measures to rid himself of his pesky sweet tooth.

Mrs. Grumm finds a turkey egg in the woods. She takes care of it in anticipation of the turkey inside someday being part of a great turkey dinner. The egg does hatch and she feeds the bird all year around with seeds, fruits and veggies from her farm. Thanksgiving time comes and she begins her preparations for Thanksgiving which means sharpening and polishing the hatchet. Turns out that sometimes you end up eating Thanksgiving dinner with the turkey instead of having turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

This book reminds me so much of my own Thanksgivings growing up…the food, the family, the games with cousins after all the eating and the togetherness. I also love the compassion and patience this book teaches all of us when one of the youngest family members gets in the way and the turkey ends up in the fish tank. Cute story…and it rhymes!

This Thanksgiving story will give most little ones the giggles…so much goes wrong while trying to get their Thanksgiving dinner together…the turkey ends up in the lake for starters. The Tappletons’ turkey dinner does not turn out AT ALL as they had hoped, but they quickly learn that it’s not the turkey that makes Thanksgiving, but the people you share it with.

Note: There are two different versions of this book. Only the illustrations are different; the story is the same.