Ready for Spaghetti
Publisher: Walker
A wonderful book of funny poems for really little ones that take us into a toddler’s world. The book looks through the lens of four cute toddlers and what they do in a busy day from ‘Jumping Up, up, uppity up’ to playing with diggers, to throwing a bouncy ball, eating spaghetti and then finally to ‘Hush and a hush at the end of the day’. The illustrations by Polly Dunbar are an absolute delight and will invite lovely, playful conversations and interactions between carers and very young children.
The poems are such fun to read out loud and say together that they feel like new classics that will be said and passed down the generations. And the charming llustrations make this a book to get out night after night, day after day. At the beginning of the book there is a brilliant introduction by Michael Rosen that explains how we have learnt all the sounds of our language by the time we’re three years old and we do it by copying the words of the people around us and inventing sounds of our own. To figure everything out, we need to explore how words and language mean stuff and how they aren’t just a stream of sounds. Books play a fantastic part in this so that’s why reading books like this with very young children is so important as well as being such brilliant fun. This is a book to treasure through the years and will make a wonderful present for a new baby.
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Our favourite poetry books (younger children)
From re-invented fairy tales to classics from Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, here are some poetry books your child is sure to love and want to read out loud.