Good Books for a 9 month old

[liztd]

Hi there

My little boy loves us reading rhymes to him at bedtime so I wondered whether anyone could recommend some new books for us?

We've been reading lots of Hairy Maclary by Lynley Dodd (he particularly likes the ones with noises) and books by Julia Donaldson (Gruffalo / Gruffalo's Child / Snail & the Whale / Stickman).

We also have some Dr Seuss but have read these loads already so are having a break from them.

Any more rhyming books / authors that anyone can recommend would be greatly appreciated for our sanity...

Thanks

Poppycat's going to be on telly soon too...really looking forward to that!

Liztd, my DS was exactly the same at that age. You might actually find you 'regress' a bit as he gets slightly older - my DS (who's now 2.6) loved Gruffalo etc at that age, but then got impatient once he was 18 months or so and wanted to turn the pages more quickly, but now he's a bit older he loves the longer books again.

I think it's never too young to get them used to rhythm and rhyme. In addition to what you've got, I'd suggest everything else that Julia Donaldson has ever done (the woman is a genius) - you mentioned Snail and Whale, which is my favourite, but I'm also a big fan of Tabby McTat and Tiddler. Other people have mentioned Peepo and Each Peach Pear Plum which are both brilliant (and both teach excellent 'finding' skills as well as listening ones). Another good one is Elusive Moose (can you tell I like it from my name? ) and others in the series. You could even try things like Dr Seuss, which DS likes.

Also, I would invest in (or dig out) books of proper children's poetry - there are some lovely anthologies out there, and I particularly like the quite old-fashioned ones like 'A Puffin Quartet of Poets', and ones featuring poets like E V Rieu and Robert Louis Stevenson. It's always been a ritual in our house to finish the bedtime routine with a couple of poems.

Obviously it's hard to separate chicken from egg, but certainly at 2.6 DS is a total bookworm. We've just started on the Flower Fairies books by Cicely Barker, and his favourite book is an illustrated Golden Treasury of verse - he always wants me to read it from cover to cover, but given that it's 124 pages long we have to agree at the outset how many poems he's allowed that day .