Great Books

Great Books for Kids – Reading is Fundamental

• Great books for kids involve lots of repetition!!!
• Books can inspire your children, expand their imaginations, and help them become better learners
• Create a “literacy rich home” – This describes a home environment that encourages children to become lifelong readers.  Families can support language learning by creating an atmosphere in which reading, writing, and talking are a natural part of daily life.
• Here’s a list to get your child’s library started:

Are You My Mother?
Baby Faces
Brown Bear, Brown Bear
Chicken Soup with Rice
Do You Want To Be My Friend?
Duck by the Sea
Fire! Fire! Said Mrs. McGuire
Good Night, Mr. Bettle
Goodnight Moon
Have You Seen My Cat?
Henny Penny
I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
I See a Cow
If You Give A Mouse a Muffin
If You Give A Mouse a Cookie
If You Give A Pig a Pancake
Is Your Mama A Llama?
It Looked Like Spilt Milk
Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?
Jump Frog, Jump
Lello the Lion
Leo the Late Bloomer
Love You Forever
Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?

My First Baby Signs
Owl Moon
Panda Bear, Panda Bear
Pat the Bunny
Polar Bear, Polar Bear
Rooster’s Off to See the World
Shapes and Colors
Sheep in a Jeep
She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
Silly Sally
Stop, Thief!
The Braggin’ Dragon
The Gingerbread Man
The Jacket I Wear In the Snow
The Snowy Day
The Three Little Pigs
The Very Busy Spider
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
The Wheels on the Bus
Today Is Monday
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
Zaza the Zebra

Book Review: Feeling Happy

I keep forgetting to share this book: Feeling Happy by PBS Kids

I love this book for speech therapy! I especially love it for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) kids because it goes through 10 (maybe 8.. I can't remember) different emotions. Each page allows the child to turn a wheel to match the emotion face to the animal in the story. Each page has short rhyming sentences to let you know the situation and the emotion that resulted. The last page has an overview and encourages the child to choose how they feel at the moment. There's also a section in the back to parents about encouraging and teaching emotion words to their kids in everyday life.

I sent this book home for a couple of weeks with a sweet, higher functioning boy with ASD who has had a LOT of difficulty regulating and expressing emotions appropriately. With a LOT of reinforcement and encouragement from his wonderful mother, he has started identifying emotions in the characters on tv and movies! I can't wait for him to tell me he's angry or upset instead of screaming and losing control.... now just to master "why" questions so that he can tell us what has caused this unwanted disruption in his emotional control!