Books and Butterflies

Lingering illness having left me languishing on the sofa most of the time for over a week now has meant that we haven't really been doing much.  We did manage to get to the library on Thursday though and both K & M signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge.  Reading 6 books in 6 weeks really isn't much of a challenge for K who really is something of a bookworm (in the evening anyway) and she would get through that in a week without the incentive of stickers and other prizes.  So when we returned this morning she had already finished her bronze, silver and gold books (2 for each).  Thanks to Puffin Post, she's recently discovered Jeremy Strong, and consequently all 6 of her books were by him.  It's also only recently that M's started reading to herself for a while after A or I have read her a couple of chapters for her bedtime story.  She's is still finding her feet when it comes to reading to herself and would prefer to be read to (something I'm usually happy to do, but it's not really an option when I have no voice!).  For example she was happy to give The Secret Garden a go recently, but although she could read it (checking with a few words memsahib for example!), she decided the writing was a bit small and the chapters a bit long for her just yet.  M hasn't quite finished the reading challenge yet, but she's only got one book left to finish it off.  Her choices were a little more varied in terms of authors, but certainly had a theme, including a Dinosaur Cove book, The Dinosaur's Packed Lunch and a couple of non-fiction books, one about Dinosaurs, which she said was okay but she already knew everything in it and another about post-dinosaur pre-historic animals which she complained about as it refered to 'sabre-toothed tigers', which we were told in Walking With Beasts was inaccurate as there were no sabre-toothed tigers, but Smilodon was the largest of the sabre-toothed cats.  For a bit of variety she also read How the Leopard got his Spots, which she really enjoyed, so we've got out the original Just So stories, for when my voice makes a reappearance.

In other news the first couple of butterflies have emerged, but I haven't as yet managed to persuade M to let me put a photo on here!