Literacy Thursday: The Diaries of a......

**Welcome to Literacy Thursdays. This post is designed to highlight some of our favorite books in hopes that you will blog about yours. We are always looking for new books to discover. Literacy is so important and even at the youngest of ages is crucial to development. If you don't have children of your own volunteer at a school, read to a neighborhood child, but get involved. It's a great way to share quality time with the youngest of our society.


Here's the play by play: You blog about your book. Give me a shout out in your blog by creating a link to my blog and using my Literacy button. Then at the bottom of my post, you will find Mr. Linky. Sign your name and add the web address of your post. Your post will automatically be linked to mine leaving a list for all to peruse. I hope you will join us.**





We have discovered The Diaries of "Bugs" by Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss thanks to our Nana. (Cronin also wrote Click, Clack, Moo.) Now, if you go to the library and look up that title, you won't get anything. Substitute "bugs" with Spider, Worm or Fly and you have it made! Nana gave Cavett the Diary of a Fly for his birthday and we have enjoyed discovering the other versions--Spider and Worm, especially this week since they have been focusing on worms at school (check out Cavett's blog).





The books begin as a serious journal entry with a date. It tells of the random events of the creature and what he learns on his way. For instance, the hopscotch area is a definite to aviod as any sort of small creature. For me, one of the entries in the worm book that laid me out was that "no matter how much my sister looked at her face in the mirror, it always looked like her rear end." Now, as much as that gave me a laugh, not all of the entries are that crass and most give factual information about the creature. Each book leads to much questioning on "why would the author have written that", which at this point, for me to turn the why question around to Cavett is fantastic!!! But, on the other hand is a huge higher level thinking question for the reader. For example,.....


The spider book states that Grampa taught us three things in school today the second of which was "without spiders, insects could take over the world." To ask at 4 year old why is this true or why "Grampa Spider" says this, liberates me. Maybe it is because I am constantly being asked why, but either way we all learn from it.

In the end, they learn about how to write daily journals/entries, even if it is one liners, and it is more non-fictional in that they learn pertinent information about creepy-crawly things. My favorite part is that Cavett has been calling them "Diarrhea of a Worm." Quite a different meaning in my book, but I think we have it corrected.

Brought to you by: Jennifer @ if you're happy and you know it