Last week we received three new books to review from Macmillan.  The children were very excited and wanted to read them straight away.  I was really pleased to see that one of them was Wake Up Do, Lydia Lou!, a new picture book by Julia Donaldson, who is a firm favourite in our house.  The other two were Oliver Fibbs: Attack of the Alien Brain and Oliver Fibbs and the Giant Boy- Munching Bugs, which looked just right for the big boys. We sat in the garden, on blankets in front of the teepee, and I started by reading Wake Up Do, Lydia Lou! to all the children.  After that I read a chapter of each of the Oliver Fibbs books to the big boys, then left them to read on for themselves.

The boys and I will tell you more about the Oliver Fibbs books in another post, but first I want to tell you about Lydia Lou.  This is how the story starts:

One night a ghost glided into Lydia Lou’s bedroom when she was fast asleep.

The ghost said: Whoo!  Wake up do, Lydia Lou!

Wake from your dream

And scream!

But Lydia Lou goes on sleeping, so the ghost calls in several noisy animals (and a baby) to help him.  It’s a brilliant story to read aloud, with its repetitive rhyming text and ever-increasing list of noises (Cock-a-doodle-doo! Boo hoo! Too-whit-too-whoo! and so on) which the children had great fun joining in with.  The illustrations, by Karen George, are lovely and the ghost looks more friendly than scary.  The story has a happy – and funny – ending, and as soon as I had finished reading it, Tiddler asked me to start again.  I have read it to him countless times since then, and to Rabbit several times too, and they love it.

As is often the case with really good books, this one gave us plenty of inspiration for further activities and learning.  Monkey and Rabbit drew pictures of the story, and Monkey painted his ghost with glow-in-the-dark paint.  Rabbit and I made flash cards of the noisy words from the story, and we have been practising matching up the pairs.  We will be able to use them to play snap and the memory game when she gets more familiar with them.

Thank you, Macmillan, for sending us such a lovely book to review.  This one definitely gets a ten out of ten from all of us!