My kids love books. Since my husband and I love books too, we have quite the collection of children’s books littering every corner of our house. There are board books that our four-year-old is just learning to read, chapter books (with no pictures!) for our bookwormy eight-year-old, and the entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes.
Being a big fan of both quality children’s literature and America, I was delighted to be asked to review Cherry Tree’s latest e-book, Tex the T-Rex. It’s a super cute story about a dinosaur hatched from a red, white, and blue egg on Independence Day. Tex’s parents tell him that he’s so lucky to share a birthday with America, a nation that stood up against a king and declared that all men were created equal.
I grabbed my iPad and my two kiddos, and we snuggled up on the couch to read Tex the T-Rex. We went through it twice, and then I asked them both for their reactions.
The eight-year-old liked the “colorful cartoon pictures” and that it rhymed. She said that it would be great for kids littler than her, because “they still need pictures to be entertained, and they’re just beginning to learn about our nation. I learned it in kindergarten!”
I asked her about the message of the story, and it gave us an opportunity to talk about how America decided to break away from the monarchy and become a nation by the people and for the people. “Yeah,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to be ruled by a king… it would be nice to be a princess, though.”
Good thing for her, she lives in the United States, where you don’t have to be born into fortune; you can make your own.
When I asked the four-year-old what was special about Tex’s birthday, she answered, “Cake!” Then she explained to me that even though Tex was hatched out of an egg, he wasn’t a chicken, he was a din-o-SAUR.
They both asked to read it a third time.
It’s easy to download the Cherry Tree app to your iPad or tablet of choice. Once you’ve done that, you can purchase patriotic children’s stories for a fraction of what you’d pay for hardcopies at the bookstore.
But wait! There’s more! My favorite feature of Cherry Tree e-books is that you can choose to read the stories yourself or have them narrated to you. It’s a Godsend for those of us with kids that haven’t quite yet mastered literacy. Nothing beats mom or dad reading stories, but man, technology is awesome when one more, “Again! Again!” is about to make your head explode.