Saturday, May 10, 2008

Dinosaurs Before Dark (Magic Tree House #1) by Mary Pope Osbourne

I have heard moms talk about the Magic Tree House series for at least two years. Last summer I browsed through a couple of the books at the stores and just didn't feel that engaged in them. They seemed too fantastical for my three year old son who was a very literal little boy.
Two weeks ago we were at the library's semi-annual book sale and they had the first six books in the series for 75c each. Since we have progressed to chapter books, my son is a year older, and this year is all about imagination adventures in our back yard, I thought we would try again.
He LOVED Dinosaurs Before Dark. We read most of the book in one sitting. He gasped with surprise. He was beside himself when the T-Rex showed up. He jumped and sat with his legs on the couch when Jack got to ride the pteranodon. I have honestly never seen the boy that excited over a book (At least not since he was a toddler and first discovered books with cars in them).
As soon as we finished Dinosaurs, we had to go get the other five books and see what they were about. We laid them all out. We figured out what order they went in. We looked inside the front cover to compare the pictures of the books. He wanted to jump immediately to Pirates Past Noon since he is still on the pirate kick. But, he was willing to concede to reading books two and three first.
So far The Knight at Dawn has not captured his imagination as much. But, I hold out hope. We just need another weekend day when we can sit on the couch together and really get involved. I will just say, I'm thrilled that there are good books out there for boys that engage their imagination and get them interested in reading. Yay! for Magic Tree House.

2 comments:

cathy said...

There are soooo many good chapter books for kids out there. We just finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Ben, and he was totally enthralled by it. We just started the sequel last night.

We tried the Magic Treehouse series last year, but Ben was unimpressed. Of course, this was before he had made the leap to chapter books. I think that we might need to revisit this series.

Dani said...

We loved MTH too. Only 300 more to go in the series! Kiddin'. :) My son ONLY checked out MTH books from the library every week at school last year. I could not persuade him to give up Jack and Anne once we discovered them. There is also a non-fiction series that she has done also as companion or stand alone books. We also did a lot of looking at covers and the such. We did eventually get out of chornological order, but that seemed to bother me more than it did Nathan.