Christmas Books

Christmas books are an excellent opportunity to engage children in literacy and build the expectation and anticipation of Christmas. We have been enjoying several books this Christmas. I thought I might share some with you.

“My Christmas Crackers” by Bronwen Davies
RRP: $9.99
Nov 2013
Scholastic Australia

You would not believe how much my children LOVE this book. I have mentioned before that they enjoy joke books, and this book is pretty well top of the Christmas hits for them! I have read it to them over and over again. (And over, and over….) Thankful Jonty is now starting to read the jokes himself, seeing my reluctant reader open up books and read it by himself, always does my heart good.

He also came up with the brilliant idea of copying some of the jokes onto his Christmas cards when he was writing them out for his classmates. Here he is copying the joke on the back cover:
Q. What do monkeys sing at Christmas time?
A Jungle Bells
I hope the recipient was able to read the yellow texta!

This morning the boys had some friends around, the boys started off the morning with the Christmas Crackers.

“Where’s Santa” is also a big hit in our house. We already had a copy of Where’s Santa from Scholastic book club several years ago. It always gets re-examined at Christmas time. It was very exciting when a Scholastic box arrived in our mailbox with a new “Where’s Santa” by Louis Shea, particularly since this was an “Around the World” edition. Jonty is very interested with all things from other countries, so this was right on his interest level. It’s basically like a “Where’s Wally”, only you are looking for the rosy cheeked fat guy!

(I noticed recently they were on sale in Myer.)

Recently Uncle Greg came over to babysit. The triplets were already in bed, so it was a pretty easy gig for him. (Especially when our usual escape-artist from the trio emerged from the room, and got such a fright seeing Uncle Greg, he howled and needed a lot of consolation, and then stayed in his bed the rest of the night.

The big boys needed a story read to them before going to bed. The “Where’s Santa books were perfect. Uncle Greg is dyslexic and dreads reading aloud, so he was more than happy to avoid lots of words. In the true style of indulgence that an uncle or aunty does, I think the boys got to examine a lot more pictures in the book than if Mummy was reading. Mind you, Mummy tires of searching for small creatures fairly easily. Daddy is also more patient than Mummy.

I don’t know what it is about the Where Is or Find it books and boys. When I was teaching, I noticed they were always popular with the boys on library days. I know girls like them too, but from my observation, boys are particularly enthusiastic to find things!

Jonty has been getting his eyes checked recently. He doesn’t need prescription glasses at this stage, but it has been recommended he do some eye strengthening exercises. In the list of activities the optometrist gave me, The “Find It” books were listed under Visual Analysis/Visualisation. (To help visual matching, memory and thinking skills.) Check!

Do your children enjoy “Find It” or joke books? Have you got a good Christmas joke that I can pass onto Jonty?