When I started the Snacks for Max blog in December of 2011, my son Max was nine months old. I could tell his preferences by whether he screamed or smiled, but I always wanted to know what he was thinking. These days, Max is in second grade, and I get to hear what he’s thinking whether I want to or not!
When Max was little, I read to him every night, but now that he knows how to read (which felt like it happened overnight when he was in Kindergarten; one of the coolest things ever was watching him learn), we take turns reading to each other. His favorite books are mysteries, though he also has a penchant for nonfiction since his Team Read sheets at school let him skip a couple of categories with nonfiction books.
If you’re unfamiliar with Team Read, it’s a program at his elementary school that rewards students for reading, similar to the Book It! and Accelerated Reader programs my schools participated in years ago. For Team Read, students fill out a sheet about each book they read, and the pages add up to advance them through the levels of the program. At our parent teacher conference in the fall, Max’s teacher said she knew that he read a lot at home from talking with him, but he hadn’t been turning in his sheets. He and I spent his fall break filling out sheets for five or six books he had read to me before bed over the previous two months, and when he took them to school, they added up to already push him into not the first or second but the third category of readers!
Here is Max’s review of one of Ron Roy’s A to Z Mysteries:
Title: A to Z Mysteries: The Deadly Dungeon
Author: Ron Roy
Illustrator: Ron Roy
# of Pages: 86
Characters: Dink, Josh, Ruth Rose, Wallis, Walker
Setting: The setting of this story is a castle and the time is a few days.
Summary: They got on a bus so they could visit their friend Wallis and her brother Walker. Walker took them lobstering when they got there. He told them a ghost story. When they got back to the castle, they heard a scream like a ghost. They got hungry so they had a picnic and then they found a trap door. In the trap door they found two parrots. It had to be a poacher, and it was, so they caught him and the parrots went back to where they came from.
I rate this book a 4 because the bad guy pretended to be their friend, but he really isn’t. I like that there is a castle right next to the ocean.
The series about Dink and his friends is one of my favorites. I would give the series as a whole 5 snacks.
Snacks for Max 