My Dog is the Tooth Fairy
Steven Viele, Elizabeth A. Corder, Ashley McKeown
Hardcover
(Lollypop Books, Sept. 14, 2018)
My Dog is the Tooth Fairy is the whimsical, hand-illustrated story about a young child's imaginative awakening to the seeming impossibility of the Tooth Fairy's job. She asks "What would you do if you knew every night that millions of teeth have come out?" She wonders how one little Tooth Fairy could accomplish such an impossible task EVERY night? Even Santa and the Easter Bunny would seem to have an easy job by comparison. Is it possible, she asks, that there might even be a Tooth Fairy in every house, perhaps disguised as some common household creature? As she falls asleep, the young girl thinks she has finally figured it out...or is she just dreaming? With its humorous rhyming story and illustrations, My Dog Is The Tooth Fairy shows how a child's magical thinking starts to transition to the world of reality. We know this unique book will become a treasured keepsake for children and their families to cherish. Any author writing books for children, especially children's poetry books, has to have drawn inspiration from the great children's authors of rhyming books like Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein (The Giving Tree) & Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo). They and so many others have filled our childhood & parenting years with love and magic. This book might be best categorized as appropriate for the 4-8 year old age group. However, as a father and a pediatrician, Dr. Viele learned & advised that rhymes are important to development of language from infancy through the grade school years. One of the best predictors of how readily a child in kindergarten will learn to read is whether he/she knows his/her nursery rhymes. Rhymes help our minds learn how to break words down into smaller sounds and thereby help us to sound out new words in both spoken and written language. They also help developing minds learn the rhythm of the written and spoken word and to modulate expression and animation in speech. Word families are the basis of language and help children build a mental library of sounds for language when they realize that similar sounds are found in words they have heard and, later, read before. Words like cat, bat, mat and fat are all part of the "-at" word family and not only sound alike but also help children realize they are generally spelled similarly, enhancing spelling ability. This understanding also prepares children to make predictions when they read, another important reading skill. Beyond their role in learning language, reading and writing, rhymes help children develop listening and thinking skills. Like songs, poems create a mental picture that also expands the imagination. On top of all of this, rhyming picture books can be FUN, adding joy to the often challenging task of learning to read. So, get some silly rhyming books and add some learning AND fun to storytime. My Dog is the Tooth Fairy can be enjoyed by children as young as 1, 2 or 3 and is perfect for ages 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and up.