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Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Two Easy Chapter Books That Are Well Done

I have a hard time finding easy chapter books for those kids that need them. In my opinion, many of them are not well written and the stories are just bad. I was excited to find two this week that I will be adding to the library and encouraging my younger readers to try out.

The first is part of the Down Girl and Sit series. Down Girl and Sit are dogs that have adventures and the one I read was called Home on the Range. Lucy Nolan has created these very funny dogs named Down Girl and Sit who have the dog philosophy "a fence keeps a dog on one side, and excitement on the other" and go to a dude ranch with their owners. While they are there the run into squirrels that bark, prairie dogs, and ugly dogs, coyotes. They also venture under a fence and discover a raging bull and meet a country dog named Git Along. The story is fun, fast paced and filled with corny puns and jokes that my younger readers are going to love. It's also illustrated by Mike Reed which will help some of the more reluctant readers pick it up. I'm going to check out the others in this series and probably adding more titles to the library.

The second first chapter is The Best Horse Ever by Alice DeLaCroix. Now I won't lie, I'm not a huge fan of horse stories, never have been, but plenty of my first and second grade girls are, so I'm constantly on the look out for new horse stories, this is a good one. Abby takes lessons at the stable just across the field and her all time favorite lesson horse, Griffin is for sale. Her parents have said if the right horse comes along, they would consider buying it for Abby and they are true to their word and Griffin comes to live at Abby's barn. After a couple of early mishaps, Abby throws herself into taking care of Griffin, so much that she begins to miss her other summer activities and offends her best friend. When she finds herself not enjoying her new horse quite so much, she realizes, after shopping trip with her mom, that she needs a little balance in her life. It's a good story with a lot of detail about horses and taking care of them that will please my horse lovers.

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