Cool Daddy Rat

I got to meet the adorable Kristyn Crow author of Cool Daddy Rat (and other picture books) at the book event I went to last month.

Kristyn gave me this book to review and I was so excited to read it to my kids. I gathered them all up on my bed and told them I had a fun new story to show them. My six year old wanted to check out the cover and read the title, author and illustrator for everyone. (In kindergarten, our fun school librarian taught the kids all about the parts of a book). I told my kids I actually got to meet Kristyn! They thought that was awesome especially I opened it up to see it was actually signed for us too! (Honestly I never realized how much kids get a kick out of meeting authors just like I do. But they do!)

During the story:
2 y/o: Laughed every time I read the silly sounding word parts.
4 y/o: Loved looking at and pointing out the pictures and laughed when her brother laughed.
6 y/o: Told me it was a cool story and wanted to read it on her own again. She liked the way the words sounded.

Then I took it to our weekly music group where at the end we have snack and read a story. It was my turn to bring a book and this months theme was "Silly" and it was the perfect opportunity to read it again! The kids there range in age from 0-4. My kids would start laughing every time I read the words crazy which would get the other kids to start laughing too. Some even tried to immitate the word sounds like zoo zat, rat tat, yow, and zooby.

The Cranberryfries family LOVED this book!
This is such a fabulous book! It was fun, as the reader, to get really animated about the words and try to read them with a lot of inflection and pizazz. On amazon you can check out the first page in the book and see what I mean. The rhythm of the book is so great not only for the kids but for the adults too!

Cool Daddy Rat has gotten a lot of awards including "Blue Ribbon Book" for 2008 by the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.