Book Review – Parragon toddler books

After meeting Parragon at Britmums Live last week, I was excited to find out about more children’s books.  In my view you can never have enough books in a home (much to my OH’s consternation), so we’re building up a good library of books for N.  Now I just need to ensure we’ve got enough storage for them all which is the issue we have for my books.  Parragon are running a Book Buddy blogger review club, where you can review books for them, so of course I jumped at the chance.

N does like a variety of books and will sit for a reasonable amount of time with me reading.  He’ll also choose books himself and read them to himself, commentating on whatever he sees.  He’s definitely following in my love of books as after we’ve read a bedtime story in the chair in his room, we then have to read a book with him sitting in bed (never comfortable with me hanging over the side of the cotbed sides to read the words), and he’ll then often want to have a book to look at himself before falling asleep.  I’m not sure how easily he manages this given it’s pretty dark in his room.

I do find it hard to get N into new books, but he was excited to find a big pile of books produced from my bags after Britmums Live.  Dinosaurs are a favourite of his at the moment, so the age 3-5 book choice from Parragon, was definitely the right age to opt for (looking at the books, the younger age would definitely be too young for him now as he’s really into story books rather than just picture ones – unless they’re about farms).

The first book was Goodnight Little One (pic).  N chose this first from a pile of new books by the side of his chair.  I was surprised, as he’s usually not that fussed about books which has dark illustrations, but he does like animals so the picture of the donkey on the front must have grasped his interest.  I can’t say our bedtime storytime is ever that quiet (N likes to commentate on stories), but he liked to shout out the animals as they were going to sleep.  It would be a perfect soothing book to read a baby or even with a child who wasn’t that keen on going to sleep, as all the other animal babies are closing their eyes.  It’s definitely a bedtime book rather than one that’s for interaction as there’s a lot of repetition and no exciting adventures, but that does lend itself to the soothing bedtime nature.  It’s definitely an ‘ahh’ book.

The second book was a brilliantly bright hard back book called ‘Things you don’t know about Dinosaurs’.  This was much more N’s type of book, although he’s not got many hardback books, so it was great to see him coping with that as well as he would paperbacks.  It’s harder for me to get to read it with him though, as he wanted to ‘my read it mummy’, holding the book so only he could see inside.  Hmmm.

The book’s really colourful, and is quite imaginative with dinosaurs getting up to all kinds of activities like riding bikes, roller skating, being in Hollywood etc, so really bringing story books up to date without being too ‘celeb’ obsessed.  N thought it was funny seeing the dinosaurs doing all the strange things you wouldn’t expect, and didn’t seem to concerned about the final page saying that a dinosaur’s favourite thing is to eat you up.  I’m not too sure about books coming straight out and saying that (maybe insinuate it in a roundabout way) – there do seem to be quite a few violent books with gruesome animals chasing little children.  Thankfully N’s not got to the scared child phase, so anything in a book is just that and he still goes to sleep afterwards.  Maybe once he starts asking the why and what questions, that’ll change, but he was quite happy with the story.  He even wanted to take the book into bed with him, but I didn’t want it being wrecked and ‘posted’ back out the cot sides once he’d finished with it.

Hopefully this will become one of his favourite books as it’s really fun and colourful, and I think it could really help his imagination thinking about what other activities dinosaurs and other animals could get up to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH8unKhGtg&feature=youtu.be

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Disclaimer: we received these 2 books from Parragon as part of their Book Buddy bloggers book review club, but all views are our own.  You can follow them on Facebook or Twitter