While I wrote an article titled Reading Levels: How I Assign Reading Levels to Books, How the Publishers Do It and How You Can Help Your Reader Find the Right Book at the Right Time that discusses how reading levels are determined by professionals and amateurs like myself, there is more on this subject to discuss. Determining the reading level of a book from the children's section is never easy, mostly because there are several different standardized methods of determining reading levels. Add to this the fact that knowing their children's reading level is most often the only tool a parent is armed with when exploring the bookstore, library, website, etc, and the job becomes even more difficult. While I think that knowing a child's reading level is a very valuable tool if your child is reading below grade level, I think that it is a secondary consideration when finding books for children reading above, especially well above, grade level because, in most cases, content app
Does anyone remember the book Por-Gua-can by Sara Ball? It's out of print now, but Axel Scheffler, illustrator of two of the best books ever, both by the incredible Julia Donaldson, has revived this formate and made it more fun with Flip Flap Farm! Scheffler and Donaldson are the team who brought us The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, Room on the Broom and, most recently, SUPERWORM, all of which you really should run out and buy if you have never heard of them. Scheffler's illustrations are colorful and expressive, and his animals (and creatures) always seem to have a look in their eye like they know something we don't...
Flip Flap Farm is definitely more enjoyable if you can read, or if you are reading it out loud to a crowd, but, for those non-readers, it's still a ton of fun to read through, flip the flaps and make up new animals. Scheffler has craftily designed his pages so that the mixing and matching of animals creates silly names for the new ones like a "rouse" (rabbit and mouse) or "pouse" (pig and mouse) and of course the "cabbit" (cow and rabbit" and the "coat" (cow and goat) and my favorite, the "squurkey" (your guess)! Along with his fantastic illustrations, Scheffler presents two rhyming quartets in the voice of the animal which, when mixed up can be pretty funny. Rather than me going on about it, take a look at the flip-flap-creations below and definitely watch the brief book trailer.
