the kids are picking away- spooky edition!

Yes, spooky is a word that is being uttered many, many times a day around these parts. There's the "spooky house" in our neighborhood that, festooned with fake spiderwebs and eerie skeleton bones scattered in the small front yard, could potentially be scary to our littlest ones. But, there's something about the word spooky compared to the word scary. Whispering the word spooky while your fingers wiggle in front of you and a smile adorns your face somehow takes the fright out of the whole thing. As a bonus, I'm finding that Red and Pudge are eating this whole spooky thing up! One of the living room book baskets is completely devoted to Autumn and Halloween picture books, and here are some of our faves. Even JAM is getting in the spirit with his own recent reading habits. Here's our Spooky Edition for 5 Minutes for Books' monthly feature- Kids' Picks.

About a decade later than the original craze, Goosebumps fever has hit JAM. He found the shelf holding these gazillion books at our public library, and as a result his home bookshelf is heavy with some spooky fare. I admit to not reading any of these, but at the rate that he reads, I simply can't keep up with everything! A recent review book that I received, An Illustrated Guide to Mythical Creatures is also providing a whole lot of freaky images and stories for the oldest males in the house. Will D&D still be around in five years?? I wonder if we'll have a father/son team in our family...

We seem to be at the point where Red and Pudge are enjoying the same types of books, so they have a combo set of four books for this post, instead of their usual two each. The absolute #1 spooky pick this season is a library book we picked up last week, In a Dark, Dark Wood. The classic folktale is told in sparse language with yup, spooky illustrations and a surprise ending that necessitates this book being read about 73 times a day. The cool thing? Red can 'read' the whole story to Pudge, taking on a fair share of those readings herself. With the same folktale as its guide, Can You See What I See? On a Scary Scary Night is one of those search-in-the-illustrations-for-hidden-items kinds of books, which works on a small level with the kids at this age, at least for the easiest of hidden items. Mostly, we just look at the very detailed images and tell spooky stories of our own!

Two other books that I received from publishers are I Need My Monster and Spooky Spooky Spooky, which from the titles alone are obviously perfect for this theme! My review of these two books, along with an additional bonus monster-riddled book reviewed by Jennifer can be found here. The gist is that these are both really cute books, at different levels, but enjoyed by both my almost 3.5 and almost 2 year old little monsters.


That's what we've been picking for our reading sessions lately. How about you? Link on up with us, won't ya?


Wishing you a spooooooky season of reading,