Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The BugaBees Book Review

The BugaBees
I've read a few good comments on various blogs about this book so I decided to make this my first official internet mail order - why not since the Aussie dollar is going so well right?

Anyway, onto the book...
Our son is two years old so although we've had the book now for a good month, we still haven't made it to the end in one sitting. Our son knows the book's name and gets it every now and then, but his attention span wanes once we get to about the third insect. In contrast, we have numerous dinosaur and dragon books which get read many times a day from front to back. The pictures are very colourful and quite animated, but at this age perhaps it just looks too busy and every page is just as busy.

The topic is of course allergy related. On the positive side, it has given our son the words to say when he's offered some food: "No thank you, I can have fun anyway." I am sure this will prove valuable in the future. He does repeat this when we read the book, so practise will hopefully make perfect. Also, the end of the book contains a quiz for kids - pictures of different foods, and they have to guess which ones they can and can't eat. Great idea actually.

On the negative side, the book deals with some but not all insects eating dairy, egg, nut, soy, shellfish and wheat based foods. Actually, now that I think of it, the most common reason we haven't actually finished the book is because our son keeps asking, "Can the bee/cricket/ladybug eat Vegemite?" Yes folks, it all boils down to Vegemite. So anyway, we've been trying to teach our son that different people and animals eat different things. "Cow's milk makes Matthew sick." "Peanut makes Matthew and Mia sick." "If Woof Woof eats chocolate, he gets sick." "Matthew doesn't eat seeds, that's for birds." You get the drift. But now, we have a book where insects eat pizza, have milkshakes and peanut butter sandwiches. So yeah, it's a little confusing for the poor boy.

Although not perfect, I'm sure this book will prove useful in the future. Plus, I'm definately going to buy more books online now!

If you know any other books worth reading, let me know!

2 comments:

  1. Grace, I think you and Matthew are clever enough to write your own book :) perhaps you can put a series together and get it published :) we might know a publisher - a client where we first worked! Xo

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're inspiring me Mei, but once I start to think a little more about it, I can see how and why it is not as easy as that to write a kid's book. All credit to other authors out there... Maybe you'll see a book being advertised here one day.

    ReplyDelete