Hey, hey, heads up. We've got a brand new book coming from a waxing. While everyone is sleeping is a picture book for ages 2 to 102 written by me Sarah McKenzie and

Illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard. Just before first morning light, Little Shrew is awakened by the moon. A

Mysterious fragrance leads her to a garden of moon flowers where mods flutter,

crickets hum and frogs and peepers keep the beat. Join Little Shrew's Mary Rump in the Moonlit Garden in this bedtime story for adventurous souls.

The book releases October 3rd and when you pre-order you'll get a bundle of Happy bonuses. See for yourself and pre-order your copy today at waxwingbooks.com.

You're listening to the Read-A-Loud Revival Podcast. This is the podcast that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.

Hello, hello, Sarah McKenzie here and you've got episode 124 of the Read-A-Loud Revival Podcast. Today I've got a

Conversation with Camille Andros. She is a picture book author. I'm very excited to introduce you to. She's also a mother of six and she's got a brand new book coming up today.

Her books, her picture books have been some of my favorites. So I'm excited for you to meet her. Now before we do have a couple other things I want to talk to you about. First of all, I just got back from the Great Home School Convention in Fort Worth, Texas.

So much fun and I'm going to be at all the rest of the Great Home School Convention this year. There's one in Greenville, South Carolina, St. Charles, Missouri, Cincinnati, Ohio, Ontario, California, Rochester, New York,

and Jacksonville, Florida. And if you live anywhere near those cities, I would love to meet you. You can find details and get your tickets at Great Home School Convention's.com. I'm giving four sessions. I'm going to be teaching for an hour about teaching from rest in the early years, all about homeschooling kids under eight.

I'm going to give a session called loving your life as a homeschooling mom. And if homeschooling has lost its shine, you are not alone. I think it's really easy to get cut up and all that dailyness of demanding tasks. And somehow in the thick of it, the homeschooling lifestyle, we were once excited about starts to seem like a drag. So we're going to walk through what's standing in our way, a falling in love with our homeschooling lives. That's loving your life as a homeschooling mom. I'm very excited about that one.

I'm also giving a session called how to talk to your kids about books, even if you haven't read them yourself. And I'll be on a mom panel on these. This is a question and answer panel with a couple of my favorite speakers, Colleen Kessler and Pam Barnhill. So once again, if you want to join me at the Great Home School conventions, I'd love to meet you there. Find out details, locations, dates, get your tickets at Great Home School conventions.com. Now before we launch into the conversation with Camille, I wanted to answer questions.

I wanted to ask you a question that came in from Catherine.

My name is Catherine and I live just outside of Chicago. And my question is, what are some of the things that you look for, particularly in text and children's books, to identify that it is a quote unquote good book? I know you've talked a lot about illustrations in particular making adults and children look at them longer and you're intrigued to know more about the details in the illustration.

But what are some of the things that you look for specifically in the text to know that it is a good book?

Oh, I love this question, Catherine. Thank you for asking. If I am trying to decide if a book is worthwhile based on its text, I'm going to read a sample of it. And what I'm looking for in particular are rich, varied vocabulary from that sampling.

So that means if I'm at the library or bookstore and I find a book, I'm going to flip it open and read maybe the first page or the first few pages if it's a picture book.

And then I'll flips to somewhere around the halfway mark and I'll read another page again, just read a couple more pages if it's a picture book. And what I want to see is a wide range of words words that I want to say out loud because they'll taste good in my mouth.

Do you know what I'm talking about? The words that are rich that you just want to hear with your ear and you want to say out loud. I don't want to see oversimplified language.

I don't want to see text that seems dull or like it's talking down to children.

In fact, looking for that rich vocabulary is part of the three question test that I talk about in chapter nine of my newest book, the Read-A-Loud Family.

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