Happy Monday!
It’s been an unpleasant few weeks in our household, with illness after illness leaving us all coughing and sneezing and wheezing. But thankfully we’re all emerging out the other side, and feeling much better! My son celebrated his sixth birthday, with much cake and many presents – but funnily enough, not a single book! We borrow so many books from our local library (I currently have 14 items out!) that we just don’t feel the need to buy any, especially given how quickly we read them.
One series we’ve been devouring recently is The Critter Club:
In the small California town of Santa Vista, four eight-year-old best friends help found and maintain The Critter Club, a rescue shelter set on saving “lost and lonely” animals, in this sweet and silly chapter book series.
We love The Critter Club! My son loves animals, and each book in this series features a group of children helping different animals and learning important lessons about friendship and life along the way. The text is approachable and the illustrations are very sweet, making for a highly accessibly early chapter book series for young readers. There are THIRTY books in the series (so far!), so I think we’ll be enjoying these for a while yet.
As the mother of a boy, it’s really important to me to share books with him that feature characters from across the gender spectrum. Books for school-age children are unfortunately highly gendered as a marketing technique, which is deeply unfortunate. There’s nothing about this series that couldn’t also relate to a group of four young boys, and yet because the books star a group of girls, and the cover is splashed with glitter, many boys would turn up their noses. The characters help animals and learn important lessons about friendship – what young child couldn’t connect with that?
Hopefully by exposing my child to books featuring male and female protagonists (and hopefully some nonbinary or trans characters, too) he’ll grow up with the understanding the boys and girls can have the same skills, talents, hobbies, interests, and most importantly, value. We’re all human beings, worthy of respect!
Anyway, I hope everyone is having a wonderful week and avoiding whatever germs seem to be floating around out there!