Raj Haldar

Just ordered pizza! How many pictures books can my wife and I read before it arrives? Here's #5 -- and here's the pizza! Pizza delivery takes five picture books!

I LOVE the sentiment of this book: book bans are inherently evil and short-sighted.

But the execution here is a bit of a jumbled mess that doesn't lend itself to reading aloud in a satisfying way.

Oooooh, I love this book. It had been sitting on my wishlist for many months, maybe even years, then I finally bought it. The third graders were absolutely amazed by it today, and even the eighth graders seemed to appreciate the farewell pages I copied for them from this lovely alphabet book, the worst one ever. Is there a better way to teach silent letters (or anything else for that matter) than through fun and games? I am definitely going to use it with other groups as well.

My baby is 10 weeks old, so we'll revisit this when she learns to talk but I figure it doesn't hurt to read out loud everything and there's big pictures for her to look at.

Really fun exploration of word exceptions, with a glossary in the back for those tricky things! I also thought it interesting they mention that a British accent will drop the r in words like "hard", but then "herbalism" was on the H page and I'm fairly certain some dialects will still pronounce it in that word.