Book Monday

This book, In Grandma's Attic, by Arleta Richardson, is one of my favorite new finds as a read-aloud for my girls. Ellie and I read it last year when she was in Kindergarten, and we thoroughly enjoyed every chapter! The premise is a young girl whose grandmother tells her stories based on items she finds around her grandma's house (and in her attic). The author is old enough to be a grandmother herself, and these are stories that her grandmother really told about her girlhood, which makes the stories date back to the 1800's. Besides being really humorous stories, each one has a moral lesson to be learned. For example, in the chapter called "Pride Goes Before the Fall", Grandma and her friend learn what trouble vanity can lead to when they sneak into church wearing some forbidden hoops under their skirts. There are lots of good lessons for girls about honesty, hard work, humility, and the like...and it's still really entertaining. This book was around when I was a girl, but I never read it. I wish I had, but I guess it's better late than never! If you like it, there are eight other books in the Grandma's Attic Collection. We are now reading the second one, More Stories from Grandma's Attic, and it's every bit as good as the first. Like I said, we use these as a read-aloud, but I would guess that they are written at about a 4th or 5th grade reading level.