This is the book for February in the 4D challenge.

9. Mrs Frisby and the rats of NIMH

Robert C. O'Brien

I had heard of this book, yet I had never seen the catoon adaptation (I hear it's pretty good) or ever picked it up, and if Kateri hadn't nominated it I suspect I would have gone my entire life never reading it. All that being said or done I'm glad that whatever thought process Kateri was going through during her selection is what we ended up with. This book was very readable, and this is often true of children's book but sadly it doesn't always transfer to adult readers. If (by some miracle) you don't know the story of Mrs Frisby then I really don't want to spoil it!

The plot wasn't hugely difficult to work out- after all it is about super clever rats in a children's book. But saying that the plot wasn't as straightforward as the usual children's book, it has some depth to the characters, there are heroes and villans- but even the heroes have flaws and the villains are not exactly evil. The events are entirely predictable but the what we learn through each of these events is more interesting.

I can see me reading this to the girls (or at least getting them to read it to themselves as our "to read" pile is ever growing. Since this is a book about some exceptionally clever rats I thought I'd share a picture of some rats of my personal acquaintance, although I'm sorry to say they are not on quite the same level as the rats from NIMH.

Whizz-poppingly fantastic.

I hadn't read the BFG since I was about eight or nine. I'd forgotten how simply gloriumptious, a razztwizzler of a book.

The delights of Quentin Blake's drawings and the whoppsy-shiffling wonderfulness of the words by Roald Dahl.

The girls adored listening to this and giggling at the descriptions of whizzpopping and giants being dangled under bellypoppers. Although, reading it out loud is tricky since you can't read what you think the word is or you'll be tripped up- "Is you having any more of this delunctious grubble" or "they will be putting me in the zoo with all the jiggyraffes and cattpiddlers". The girls giggled and giggled their way through the book.

And at least one of them believes that the BFG really does bring dreams to little human beans.

The girls were given some money for their Christmas and they decided to spend it in the bookshop (oh, they are so my daughters aren't they?)

This was one of their choices: Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown

This is a book I remember from when I was around Charlotte's age (I didn't own this book and I don't think our library had it so it must have been something I read at school). The premise of the story is pretty simple- Stanley goes to bed one night and a big bulletin board falls on him and squashes him flat. He isn't injured or hurt (reality plus kids books don't often go together) and we learn about all the adventures Stanley has when he is flat- being posted, solving crimes and being flown as a kite. All of which the girls enjoyed.

What I hadn't noticed as a child was that there is a moral to the story- actually there are probably one or two on the same theme- it's okay to be different, bullying is bad and you shouldn't single someone out because of how they look or what they think or believe. Pretty big ideas for a 5 or 6 year old but told in such a way that it's fun to learn because they are never going to be in the situation where they will meet someone like Stanley but it did allow us to talk about people being different and what to do if someone was mean to them without it being a big "talk". Nice one Stanley.

The book is still as much fun as when I was little, it hasn't lost anything in the last 25 years and doesn't feel out of date as some of my childhood favourites have upon rereading. What isn't fun about the idea of being posted all the way across the country in an envelope. In fact when I was looking for an image I found a blog which kind of captures this idea as a way to teach children about the world.

This book is probably about thre right reading level of a 6 year old who is a confident reader- Charlotte found it pretty straight forward and there are few tricky or unusual words. The pictures were frequent enough and interesting enough to capture the attention of Minnie who is nearly three and Lexie enjoyed listening to the story and trying to anticipate what would happen next.

I don't think I can count this as one of my 100 books in 2011 challenge but I think if I read 5 books of a similar size aloud to the girls I will group them together as Children's Short Stories (If they were all bound together I would totally have counted them!)

Book No 3: Read Aloud to the girls.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J.K. Rowling

This is not the first time I have read this  (I've even listened to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry reading it aloud and he is far, far better than me) but it's all part of the fun of reading to my girls. We have read on average slightly more than a chapter a night (and we've read it most nights) so it probably took about 14 nights to read it in total- we did start it just after Christmas.

I've been planning to read these to the girls since they were little so I've carefully managed to avoid them watching the films so the story was completely new to them. They thought Fred and George were hilarious (exploding toilet seats!), took ages to warm to Hermione and didn't like Malfoy right from the start. Each night they couldn't wait for the next chapter and tried to guess what was going to happen.

Charlotte loved "all of it" and her favourite bit was "Harry's first day at Hogwarts", Lexie loved it but "was worried about Harry and liked it when the flags changed at the end because they were so brave".

The only problem is that Minnie is still too small to concentrate on this kind of book so I had to read her the same three Peppa Pig books.