Tuesday 3 January 2012

How Many? by Ron van der Meer and I Like This Poem by Kaye Webb

We had some friends over today that haven't been over for ages, in fact it must be years, as said friends were surprised at the "new" carpet, which has been down for a couple of years at least. It was very lovely to see them, and fun to watch the littlest one, as she kept exclaiming "I've not been here before!" She has been lots, but was too little to remember before. Said little one has a very endearing obsession with pop-up books, so every pop-up book we own has been off the shelf and read today. She was particularly keen on How Many? by Ron van der Meer. A has always loved this book too. The paper-engineering is stunning, and the basic idea is really nice - each page takes a shape, eg a square or a star, and there are hundreds of shapes in the pop up. Around the edge of the page there are questions such as "how many red squares are there?" I thought this would be a good way to encourage A to take more interest in counting when I bought the book back in the day. However, as she was talking to her little friend about it she said " There's questions round the page, and you won't be able to read those but don't worry - they're really boring; I just like looking at the pictures". Foiled again!

At bedtime we finished Killer Cat's Christmas, had a chapter of Mr Gum and then had one or two poems from I Like This Poem by Kaye Webb. We enjoyed the poem about the beetle particularly. It's a nice little collection, and I think a good poetry anthology is invaluable for bedtime stories - you can offer an extra poem as a treat, and it only takes a moment. Poems read only a few times are easily memorised by children and often repeated, especially, in this house, funny poems. Everyone's happy.

2 comments:

  1. I had 'I like this poem' I am sure, when I was a kid. It sounds so familiar..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, it's a reprint - it's been going strong for a while I think :-)

    ReplyDelete