I picked up this book from the library due to my son's overwhelming love of snow. I grabbed it, flipped through it, saw it had very few words, and decided it was good for our reading time. (On a sidenote, I absolutely hate when I don't do this and I get a book with wordy paragraphs that my son cannot handle yet. He wants to read the book, so he won't let me stop reading, but he climbs all over me because he finds wordy paragraphs boring.)When I got home and read it to him, I was a little surprised by the subtitle of the book "An Onomatopoeic Story", but we started it together nonetheless. I admired the gorgeous watercolor pages, full of expressive drawings. These pictures make you remember the feel of a snow day from your youth, with the dark and the quiet.
My son settled into my side and after I started to make sounds, but not tell a story, he became impressed by the snow plow sounds I was making. I encouraged him to tell me a story about what was going happening on the pages. The lack of a story to tell became a story to hear from him. I'd prompt him, "What is the boy doing at his window?" "What is the boy eating?" "What is he feeling?" At first, my two year old would simply looked stumped and say, "Hmm..." (No lie, my son puts his finger on his chin thoughtfully and says hmm.)
After the second or third reading, with prompts, he started to answer and tell me more about the pages. "People drive the snow plow", "Boy eat cereal. Cat get some too.", and "Boy get toy. Boy happy?"
We'd have rudimentary discussions about the different types of snow plows in the book, and who was awake, and why. Now, it's a nightly story at bedtime. I don't know how I'm going to explain to him that we don't own this book! It might be a keeper and one we have to grab off of Amazon.
I'm pretty sure that this is at least a nine in my son's eyes!
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