Book Fair - finally, good books!

After two book fairs in which I allowed the kids to pick anything and I couldn't force myself to read the poor texts, I decided, I will put my censorship in place and only allow books worthy of the dollars I am exchanging for them. Clearly, my kids were not happy, as all the barbie, pinkalicious, chima, njnajgo, etc. were off limits.

But...

We left content. Here is why:

Good Books! Terrible Books :(

Today while browsing randomly the internet, I saw references to these books.

  

This week was book fair at the public school the kids attend. Here is what we picked:

Sunlight boy picked the Tough Trucks. This is a good book about large machines that are used in different ways in our lives. This is a board book and is quite durable. I love the pictures and the details in the pictures which open up so much room for discussion, explanation and observation. We had a tough winter and a lot of snow is now melting. If the roads are not maintained clean, we can experience flooding. The last page of this book gave me the idea to explain that. So, I love it. I am sure other opportunities will come soon enough. I recommend this book. One day it will make an easy read for him. I picked up the duck book. It is entertaining, and exactly suitable for a first grader to read. I recommend it, my daughter who read it recommends it too.

Ballet girl picked up The Barbie Mariposa and the Fairy Butterflies. All Barbie books are poorly written. I think as a reading along, given knowledge of the corresponding film, this book could be quite entertaining. As a read-aloud, however, which is how I am using it, this book was very difficult and unpleasant. In general, I have noticed that about the Barbie books, Golden books included. I picked Princesses and Puppies. It is below Ballet girl's reading level, but I continue to push such books every once in a while to work on fluency. The text is simple and interesting. I do recommend this book. Ballet girl read it and enjoyed it.

Warning! Here comes bad news!

My little guy is a Lego enthusiast. We are currently a Duplo house but downstairs I have a stash of robotic Lego sets. I love Lego, but I think Lego should stick to what it does best. Books with Lego characters are a disaster. Too simple, too shallow, too complicated, ridden with poor sentence structure, unclear references, complicated plots, jungle of character names, bizarre plot settings, no proper description of the plot sets, tons of cultural references-some even offensive. I am extremely disappointed at the Lego books. We initially received some from my nephew once he outgrew them, and those first level readers are ok-basic, simple. But these plot-chapter-type of Lego books is plain junk. I highly regret owning these. I regret not paying attending when Sunlight boy was making his selections. 

Book fairs are a good idea. It is good once in a while to let the children make choices. I make most of the book choices, although we have recently adopted the scheme where I pick a book and each of them picks a book. Reading bad books is good as it allows us to form a baseline from which to judge the good books and learn to gravitate towards them. Even bad books are good for learning to read, but they too must meet some basic criteria-must have simple, straightforward story line, and small number of characters.


I read very good reviews and now I am super excited about getting my hands and eyes on a sample. It turns out that through a inter library loan I can borrow some from my local library.
If they prove as good as described, I would be inclined to purchase at least some in the series.
UPDATE 4/24/2014: I did not like these books. They were too long and not interesting.