Dinosaur Fun with Reference Books!

A friend asked me yesterday how you know if you're encouraging your child in a hobby that the child really wants to do, or if you are just pushing them towards an activity that you want them to want to do. Difficult question! And I'm not about to provide you with a wise answer, either, cos I haven't got one! But I did find myself asking myself the same question last night after I'd put my little book bugs to bed. You see, I love dinosaurs ( see this post, too), and recently my bugs are getting into them as well. Am I forcing them to by giving them cool books about them and wanting to play dinosaurs at any available moment? Or am I just offering them something interesting that they can take or leave? Who knows?! But I'm definitely going to make the most of it while it lasts!

I'm going to talk about two books today, both of them reference books, not stories. This is one of them:

Larousse Enciclopedia Increïble: Dinosaures, 2010

Our copy's in Catalan, and I've found it in Spanish too, but it doesn't appear to be published in English :-(  But I do want to tell you why we like it and what we get out of it anyway, then you can see for yourselves what you can find in whatever language you need! And if you can use it in either Spanish or Catalan, I thoroughly recommend it!

Room on the Broom, Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler

Perhaps I shouldn't review anything by the award- winning Donaldson- Scheffler team if I don't start with The Gruffalo, the most well-known of their books. But just because everyone has heard of The Gruffalo, I wanted to start with another one, and I think this one is brilliant, definitely up there with The Gruffalo itself! It's also one that a friend of mine doesn't have. I promised him this review, and I hope it convinces him to get it for his little girl.

Room on the Broom is a fantastic treatise on the value of sharing and of having friends! A series of animals help a butterfingered witch get her belongings back as, one by one, they fall off her broomstick, and in return she and her cat allow them to clamber on and share a windswept ride with them, until the broomstick becomes quite crowded and disaster strikes! Luckily, the witch’s newfound friends are there to help her out of the sticky situation she finds herself in.