Books and Twaddle

In my kids' early days, we read anything and everything we could get our hands on. It's easy to tell that some books are just better written than others, but for some reason, my kids seemed drawn to twaddle.

What's twaddle? Twaddle is literature that has been dumbed down and has an absence of meaning.

What's the opposite of twaddle? Living books....in living books the narrative and the characters come alive. I am loving that our Five in a Row curriculum is not only based on living books, but we have learned how to get more out of the stories.

If you want to read more about twaddle and living books, and see a wonderful list (by grade) of living books, go HERE.

If you are still wondering what counts as twaddle, let me give you an example from our own library - these particular books are cherished by our youngest and they are twaddle at it's finest!

To be honest with you, when I first heard about twaddle vs. living books, I was not all that interested in figuring out the difference. I wanted my kids to enjoy reading and being read to. However, now that we've been doing school with a reading based curriculum, my own reading tastes have changed. Even in my own reading, I don't want to waste time with twaddle. Here are some of my favorite books we've read from Five in a Row.

I've also recently run across this series. Many of our FIAR books take place in other countries and we have learned so much about our world. These are full of interesting facts about the geography, culture and people of different countries. The photos are also quite nice.

Animal Friends by Janette Oke

We are also working our way through this series, and both girls seem to be enjoying them. Unfortunately our library doesn't have these, but I was able to get these all free through paperback swap.

These are the same stories in expanded form. Spunky's Diary was my favorite when I was little. This copy is my original one. The others I've gotten through paperback swap. We haven't started reading these yet.

And finally...the Serendipity books by Stephen Cosgrove. We don't have many of them, but we enjoy the ones we have.

What books are your kids enjoying lately?