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Give your opinions on Magic Treehouse, Cam Jansen, and Puppy Place book series


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Please give me your opinions on these books series:

 

Magic Treehouse, Cam Jansen, and Puppy Place.

 

I have a six year old who is getting sick of early readers and is ready for chapter books. Any feedback positive or negative is welcome! If you have any other suggestions for books series, titles, PLEASE give those as well! Thanks! :D

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MTH has been a huge hit at our house. My boys have always loved them and learned a lot from them. We haven't read the other two series.

 

:iagree: DS also loved when I found some of them on CD. He read books 1-25 last summer. Being the mean mom I am, I told him there weren't any more after Book 25 :D because I just couldn't hear anymore about Jack and Annie :lol:. He still considers them some of his favorite books.

 

Mary Pope Osborne also wrote Tales from the Odyssey which were quickly consumed by DS.

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There are a lot of other great options out there that I would choose over MTH or Puppy Place. :001_smile:

 

Really? I would love to hear suggestions. I feel like there are tons of great high-quality options when kids are reading the leveled readers with chapters, but once you make the leap to early chapter books with a ton of words on the page it seems like a vast literary wasteland to me.

 

If your rule is that MTH books are not for school, I'd also love to hear examples of your kids are reading for school at that same reading level.

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Please give me your opinions on these books series:

 

Magic Treehouse, Cam Jansen, and Puppy Place.

 

I have a six year old who is getting sick of early readers and is ready for chapter books. Any feedback positive or negative is welcome! If you have any other suggestions for books series, titles, PLEASE give those as well! Thanks! :D

 

We love Magic Treehouse around here - all 3 kids.

My girls also like the Rainbow Fairies books - there are several different series, each series has 7 books in it and they are all pretty similar.

 

We have done a Cam Jansen or two, they didn't seem to really "stick" and we haven't read any of the Puppy ones.

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Mary Pope Osborne also wrote Tales from the Odyssey which were quickly consumed by DS

 

 

MTH never conts for school reading, the research guides can and my oldest devoured the Tales From the Odyssey and my middle will probably read them next year when we go back to ancients for a literature choice.

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My now eight year old loved all three at about the same age. No, they're not the classics, but they are very engaging for the short people. Her absolute favorite series was the fairy books by Daisy Meadow. They are simple, formulaic, and (according to me) vomitous. But the little person LOVED them. In fact, she still does. The child that devoured The Lost Hero in two days STILL goes first to the fairy books to see if there's anything new. :glare: Other big hits were Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, the Magic Kitten/Puppy/Gerbil/insert animal books, and any series with ponies/unicorns/fairies.

 

She's halfway through an unabridged copy of the Swiss Family Robinson, so I don't think they ruined her for literature!

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Puppy Place, Animal Ark, (sorry dcjlkplus3!:001_smile:) and Rainbow Fairies are the kinds of books that drive me bananas--

MTH at least has the kids visiting historical places (for the most part) and gives a little content.

 

Cam Jansen and A to Z Mysteries seem to have better plots--but still not that great.

 

Sarah, Plain and Tall and its sequels offer beautiful, sparse language, an intelligent plot, and lovely characters, and aren't much harder than the above. Look for books like Clara and The Bookwagon, or some of the Sonlight chapter books for 1-3 grades.

 

A kid that can read A to Z can probably pick up the first Little House book and start it. Sure, it'll be slow, but the difference is worth the little bit of extra work it might take.

 

To get over the hump, so to speak, I know lots of people who bypass most of the early chapter books and just read with their child, taking turns.

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My youngest really enjoyed MTH. They met his imagination need. They were his "reading log" material for a long time. They were entertaining enough to keep him going and that improved his reading fluency, which is one of the reading goals. I am really glad that he enjoyed them and read many of them.

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There was an interesting thread, recently, that talked about the need these books fill for kids. The plots are usually redundant, but that gives kids of that age a safe zone. They can develop their reading skills without huge emotional upheavals.

 

Those are books that I have dd read on her own. EXCEPT, we may read the first one together to get her hooked.

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I personally feel like the writing in Cam Jansen is a step or three above the Magic Tree House books. My oldest did like the stories in MTH but we used them as a introduction to having longer read-alouds when she was 3 or so. The sentence structure in MTH is abysmal - lots of choppy sentence fragments. I don't know anything about Puppy Place (or, really, any Cam Jansen that may have been written in the last 20 years - all of ours are older copies).

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If your rule is that MTH books are not for school, I'd also love to hear examples of your kids are reading for school at that same reading level.

 

We don't read these serial books for school. I use the Scholastic website to pick books. Since dd can read harder books to me, than she will read on her own, it's not too hard to find books. She reads 2nd to 3rd grade on her own and up to 3rd to 5th with me. I will alternate pages, if it's a really long book.

 

We've done:

Courage of Sarah Noble

Pippi Longstocking

Aesops Fables

Magic School Bus

Non- fiction science or history

High interest picture books. Many of these have higher level vocabulary, but shorter length and good pictures.

 

I think I'm going to try Little House Books next. Maybe alternating pages.

 

And I do let dd read about anything on her own. I draw the line at crude humor. I allowed Junie B, but not those fart books.

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My now eight year old loved all three at about the same age. No, they're not the classics, but they are very engaging for the short people. Her absolute favorite series was the fairy books by Daisy Meadow. They are simple, formulaic, and (according to me) vomitous. But the little perso

 

Yes, yes, yes.

 

I credit those fairy books with greatly increasing dd's reading ability last summer. She read and read and read those things. It's still the first section of the library she looks in.

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Other ideas for series:

Pinky and Rex

Eve Titus' Anatole

Beverly Cleary's Ramona series

The Littles

 

Thanks for suggesting The Littles! I remember liking those as a kid. I'll get one from the library for my DD:)

 

She just read the first Magic Treehouse book (in a single day, I might add!) and loved it. I agree with what others have said about them - not deep, but a good, easy read. I'll gladly have her read more. She also like the one Rainbow Fairy book that she read recently.

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Really? I would love to hear suggestions. I feel like there are tons of great high-quality options when kids are reading the leveled readers with chapters, but once you make the leap to early chapter books with a ton of words on the page it seems like a vast literary wasteland to me.

 

If your rule is that MTH books are not for school, I'd also love to hear examples of your kids are reading for school at that same reading level.

 

We don't read them at all. We don't read most of the popular new series books, because I prefer to (1.) fill their minds with quality vocabulary and sentence structures, and (2.) avoid the attitudes and such modeled in many of them (not necessarily MTH, but others of the same type.)

 

At the MTH level, we read:

 

as a pp said, The Littles

 

many of the books from this list that I put together for boys in dh's classroom when he taught (A Lion to Guard Us, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, etc.)

 

not great reading, but better than most series: The Bobbsey Twins

 

good series books: Betsy-Tacy for girls, Hank the Cowdog for boys

 

and so on...

 

I've read a few MTH, and I pick up other new series when I see them (I spend a lot of time sitting in B&N reading while kiddos are at Lego or art or music lessons,) because I know people will ask me about them eventually. I am rarely impressed.

Edited by angela in ohio
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My kids like MTH ok. Cam Jansen was ok, too. My oldest DS loved Boxcar Children at that age and the Hardy Boys. DD has really loved Junie B. and Ramona. She likes Little House, too.

 

I pretty much let them browse the library to see what piques their interest. Sometimes I offer suggestions, but for fun reading, I like them pick what they want (within reason - sorry Capt. Underpants).

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