Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 5: Engineering (Summer Reading Program)

And finally for the older kids:

I recycled Block City because it's important for kids to have exposure to classics and to poetry, so even though it's a bit juvenile for this group, I'm doing it anyway.  Everybody should have the cultural notion of playing with blocks and creating something wonderful in your mind.


Finishing us out for the day (I'm doing three today, despite the heat, because they were sad that I only did two last week) are:


Building Our House
Jonathan Bean
ISBN: 9780374380236
Dense, but really interesting.  Gail Gibbon's How a House is Built for the older set, with the bonus that it's actually a true story!  The photographs at the end of the story (of the real house during construction) were confusing to the kids - they thought they were looking at the ruins of the old house!  Otherwise, they enjoyed the idea of building their own home, and the idea of having "parties" to work just blew their minds.


Dinosaur Dig!
Penny Dale
ISBN: 9780763658717
Brightly colored dinosaurs work with realistic earthmovers in a vibrant, gritty environment to create something cool for themselves.  The kids liked the idea of a pool, but they thought that the author should have called it a water park because it had slides and fountains in it.

Andrew Henry's Meadow, Doris Burn

Andrew Henry's Meadow
Doris Burn
ISBN: 9780399256080
Read Feb 24, 2014

Another "classic" that I somehow never heard of.  I know I read a lot as a child, but I'm beginning to think that I just read the same few approved Christian books over and over and over again.  That and Childcraft and Disney storybooks.

This book is also a bit of an interesting case - apparently the original has much more intricate illustrations (which is frankly hard to believe given the ones seen in this edition) that were altered/zoomed in for the re-print.  Regardless, they are still nifty, and have lots of nice pen-and-ink scratchy illustrated details for readers to pore over.

Andrew Henry is an inventor, and he's also a middle child - his older sisters don't really want to associate with him, and his little brothers are too little to really be interested in his inventions.  So he runs away and creates a house for himself in a nearby meadow.  What's really interesting is that like flies to a honeypot, a collection of neighbor kids begin arriving in the same meadow - girls and boys alike - united in their need to have a place of their own to engage with their hobbies and interests.  Andrew Henry accomodates them all with a series of incredibly awesome personalized houses, and they live happily in their meadow for 4 days until their frantic families search them out and return them back home.

For Andrew Henry, his family gives him part of the basement for his workshop, and become much more invested in paying attention to him and his inventions.

(I would love to see a full-length children's novel or film written out that combines this and the picture book Roxaboxen, and Weslandia.  It would be epic.  Parents would freak, and kids everywhere would be so happy.

This book was recommended by The Read-Aloud Handbook