Hi Sarah. Hi Sarah. My name is Holly. Hi Sarah. My name is April. I'm in Melbourne, Australia.

I have a question about my name is Julie Ann and we live in India. I am wondering,

Hi Sarah. This is Crystal from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Can you give me a suggestion for an especially fabulous book?

Hey there. I'm Sarah McKenzie. This is the Read-A-Loud Revival. And in this short episode,

I'm answering one of your questions. Hi Sarah. This is Sarah. My question is how do you

find a book that keeps an eight-year-old and a four-year-old actively engaged while you're doing your

read-A-Loud? Hey Sarah. Okay. First thing that comes to mind is picture books. Picture books almost

necessitate our kids to be actively engaged because they're looking at the pictures as we're reading

aloud the words. And your eight-year-old is definitely not too old for picture books. We've talked

about this recently on the show, but I'll say it again because it's so important. Picture books

tend to have more sophisticated language patterns, better word choice, vocabulary, diction,

more sophisticated, rich and beautiful language than chapter books and novels. So when we go from

reading picture books up to reading novels, we're actually taking a step down in the beauty and

complexity of the language. This is just really helpful to remember. So if picture books keep both

of your kids interested, I'd stay with picture books longer and not even feel the need to really

move up to anything else yet. Now, a couple of specific recommendations. Torbin Kulman, K-U-H-L-M-A-N-N,

I believe. His books would be a good fit here. They're called Armstrong Edison, Lindbergh,

Moltown, I think is another one. They're basically a hybrid between a picture book and a chapter book

because they have longer text, a longer story, but tons and tons of full color, really big illustrations,

they're gorgeous. Another really good recommendation would be Jonathan Oxy-A's fabled stable series,

starts with Will Let The Whisp. The second one is something about the truth about

Tatltails or something like that. Tatltails is in the title and he wrote those with the intention

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