This one is great because it isn't *too* spooky. ( )

Themed Book. Good for the holidays. Good for word choice activities and vocabulary building.

Eve Bunting's "In the Haunted House" starts with two people entering a house, one wearing a small shoe and one wearing a bigger shoe, which is a mystery because you want to know who they are. The author puts you in the spirit of Halloween making you think something spooky will happen. The organ is playing by itself so you automatically think you are in a haunted house and it keeps the reader on the edge of their seat thinking something will happen soon. At the end of the book if you look close you can see the record player next to the organ and its all making sense now. When scary things happen people tend to stay together. We learn that a daughter and her father are leaving a haunted house at the end of the book and the dad was actually more scared than the little girl. The line is now long out of the front of the haunted house and now we can tell it was a commercial haunted house the entire time. Size does not determine courage. Eve Bunting rhymes her words about the scary haunted house and makes it easy to follow the movement of the words. Young readers wont be so scared about going into haunted house after reading this books that pairs scary with funny. ( )

I enjoyed this book for a few different reasons. First, I enjoyed the flaps occurring on each page with an image under it because it allow the reader to be curious about what illustration is going to pop up behind the flaps. For example, behind the flap with the door is a mummy in a bed. This is interesting because it has the reader question what they think is about to happen in the story. Next, I thought the rhyming throughout the story was critical because it can help the reader learn the different word families. For example, the words hide and inside on the first page. They would be grouped in the same family because they both end in ide. The main idea of the story is showing scary features of what actually occurs in a haunted house. ( )

29 months - I picked this one more based on illustrations than story. A quick rhyming read. ( )