“Mom, I want this one!” “Mom, it’s my turn!” “Mom, I can’t see the pictures!”–this craziness is called bedtime stories with three kids and a tired mom! I can’t read to all of them at the same time. So, with a sudden stroke of inspiration one night, I asked Anne to read Mary a book and I read Eliza a book. (Why hadn’t I thought of that before!?)
Everyone loves that routine now! Anne and Mary will often fall asleep reading to each other. One of Mary’s new favorites for Anne to read to her is the “Martha Speaks” chapter books.
There are a lot of beginning level chapter books out there. I tend to love the ones that are entertaining and imaginative, and where the kids in the story are, well, NICE! I really don’t go for the bratty kids books. (It would be like giving my kids a textbook on how to be a brat! Why would I do that!)
Anyway, “Martha Speaks” books are great and are taken from the PBS show. My kids mostly came to love them by first playing the Martha games on www.pbskids.org. They were excited when we found the books at the school book fair. They are a lot easier than Anne’s reading level, but she is still entertained by them and mostly loves reading them to Mary. They also have a lot of pictures, which is another great thing for Mary or any four-year-old.
Here they are opening some of the new books that came in the mail…
…they pretty much devour them.
So about “Martha Speaks.” Martha is a dog that belongs to a girl named Helen. One day Helen fed her dog some alphabet soup and by some crazy phenomenon, the alphabet letters traveled to the dog’s brain instead of her stomach! So now Martha the dog can speak, and she gets into fun and imaginitive adventures with her one-of-a-kind talking talent.
The Martha Lunch
Since the kids have been loving these books lately, I thought it would be fun to have a ‘Martha lunch’ and have ABC Chef Boyardee.
They’ve never really had anything like this before, and when I explained it was like ‘Martha’s alphabet soup,’ Mary looked down and said… “You mean it’s dog food?”
No Silly! I told her it was like the alphabet soup that made Martha talk. Then she was excited. We started being silly and pretended that maybe the soup would make us talk like a dog instead! Or that maybe we would speak Spanish or German! After that, Mary and Eliza just had fun finding the letters of their names, or just sounding out the letters before eating them.
F is for “Fun.”
M is for “Mmmmm.”