This week we read a couple of the Daisy Meadows [Stupid Theme] Fairies books.  Hear me out.  I’m trying to transition Geraldine into reading chapter books—not to wean her off picture books, of course, but to expand her reading options—and I decided to start by looking for chapter books with pictures on every page.  Just to start.

[Stupid Theme] Fairies seemed to fit the bill.  Pictures on each page, and she likes girly stuff like that.  To be honest, they’re less painful than I anticipated.  We’ve read two so far:  Storm the Lightning Fairy and Gemma the Gymnastics Fairy.  Storm was hard for her to get into at first.  She read a few pages, then claimed to be too tired to continue, so I read through the end of the chapter.  As soon as there was a little bit of excitement, I handed it back over, and she read three chapters straight.  Yay!  Then the action tapered off, and I got the same whiny excuse—I’m tired—so I finished it off. 

Gemma lacked excitement altogether, so I read most of that one, but it still kept their attention.  We got it because the girls do gymnastics, but the hula hoop that was central to the plot didn’t seem to have much to do with the sport.  And yet, it was Gemma’s “magic sporty object”—the source of her power.

One snag that I didn’t anticipate is how much Rhys enjoys hearing the stories, too.  That’s almost a good thing, except it’s hard for her to follow along when Geraldine does the reading; she doesn’t use intonation since she’s so focused on decoding.  And separate concurrent reading is not going to work out for us, because one inevitably puts down her book to follow along with the other.  They don’t want to miss a beat.

[ Posted in » Book Review Channel :: Fiction Reviews :: Graves girls read! ]