Story Time Monday

Today was Story Time Monday and the theme was dogs. Or, more specifically, dogs who are sometimes bad. The pre-Kindergarten children heard Dogku, the tale of a lost dog who finds a home and keeps it, even when he chews socks and gets into the trash. This was a recent purchase, found when I was looking for Pre-K books about dogs and spotted Andrew Clements name when I did a subject search on our vendor's database. Our 5th and 6th graders enjoy the several books by Clements in the Middle School library and I and am currently reading Report Card to Paul as our bedtime reading. So when I saw he had a book out for the PreSchool/K crowd and that it was written in haiku, I was intrigued. It turned out to be as good as I'd hoped. The story is funny, dramatic, and happy, the haiku is clever, and the illustrations effective.

I enjoyed that book so much that I ended up reading it to the Kindergartners along with what I had planned, which was Bad Dog, Dodger! by Barbara Abercrombie with illustrations by Adam Gustavson. This interesting story of how Dodger benefits from dog training caught the children's attention, but it was the description of an exciting baseball game --when Dodge runs onto the field and catches the ball -- that had a least one child clapping his hands with pleasure.