Customer Reviews

The Surprise Family

5 star:		(4)
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We found this book a delightful surprise. The story is quite sweet and the repetition comforting. My 2+1/2 year old has made this one of his favorites. The protectiveness of both the boy as mama and then the hen as mama is wonderfully reinforcing. We love to enact the mama hen's danger squalk and danger dance.

The rhyming and pacing of the story make it fun for a read aloud, especially when you have to do it over and over again. I also find the balance of artwork and white space and the size of the text on the page to make it even that more appealing. Our son even loves to study the cover of the book which represents the whole story line in picture vignettes if you follow the squares arround the border.

I would also highly recommend this book as a novel way to introduce the concept of family diversity and/or adoption too.

Written at a reading level easily mastered by first graders, the message of love in this book can be appreciated by anyone who has ever loved or been loved. It has a deeper message of diversity though. Not everyone's family is like they expected it to be, but what matters is the love within it.

Our first grader laughed out loud when he read this book. Its an age appropriate book, with a cute story line. I purchased it as a homeschooler, because I noticed it was on the local schools First grade reading list, and I thought it would be helpful to see if he was keeping up! A first grade reader should be able to read it by the middle to end of the first grade.

Use Lynn Reiser's care-giving characters to DECODEnglish!

Engaging stories like this one are fun for your child to read when explicit pronunciation, spelling, and decoding skills have progessed to Level 4. Other Amazon titles with similar linguistic complexity include:

The Zax (from "The Sneetches and Other Stories) by Dr. Seuss

The Bagpipe Who Didn't Say No (from "Where the Sidewalk Ends") by Shel Silverstein

"The Big Red Barn" by Margaret W. Brown

"Pie Rats Ahoy!" by Richard Scarry

"Swimmy" by Leo Lionni

"First Tomato" by Rosemary Wells