The holiday season approacheth, and I seek recommendations for books to give as gifts to my 7 year old nephew. He's in 2nd grade, he can read but I don't think does it addictively for pleasure or anything. He is currently obsessed with airplanes, especially US military. I can't think of any books he might like! I was thinking of a kids' magazine, if they still publish National Geographic World maybe... ideas?

Also, at what age do people think is right to start reading chapter books to a kid? Casper has a great attention span at just over 3, and can grasp whole movies. Do you think it's too soon to start with something like Stuart Little? Other suggestions?

flea, I bet you could start with episodic chapter books, like Frog and Toad are Friends. If she can hold on for the whole thing, fine; if not, every story basically ends at the end of a chapter. Also, I suspect she has graduated to the longer picture books, like Bill Peet and William Steig. (Do you have the family copy of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble ?)

For the 2nd grader, you might ask the children's librarian if you can peruse her back issues of School Library Journal -- you might find a few good reviews of age-appropriate airplane books.

We already do stuff like longer picture books and the episodic chapters like Frog and Toad and Little Bear - she has no problem with those, but does find things like Tailor of Gloucester a little long. Or maybe she just thinks that one is boring. (We do not have Sylvester, but she will happily read CDB!)

We may have School Library Journal at work, I'll check.

Bizaare Amazon Reviews #238 (Stuart Little):

And Stuart is obviously gay, not that there's anything wrong with that (I'm gay ... check out the illustration on page 31) He doesn't really want to date the girl, he's more interested in his canoe ...

I didn't even know what it was,

We had It's Academic. Oh, and maybe Knowledge Masters? That sounds familiar, anyway.

But I didn't do any of that stuff, because it would have involved spending more time with my peers.

We had It's Academic! I wasn't on our school's team, but we kicked some serious ass. I did go to the finals match my senior year (because it was on local NBC, and we needed a big cheering section in the audience).

I'm also feeling like the only Buffista who wasn't in AD, but if my school or state had had it, I would've been! Really!

We didn't have it! Just Knowledge Bowl.

We had a large trophy that didn't quite fit right in the I.B. breakroom.

Flea, do you read her the Winnie the Pooh books?

We had Academic Decathlon. I think it started my junior year. Anyway, I remember themes being Global Economy and Technology. Books as Jane Eyre and Remains of the Day and Siddhartha. Not sure what years those all correspond to. We never made it to states -- we were always scrounging for team members, and usually ended up with about four people who actually studied, and five who filled seats.

Ooh, I forgot about Knowledge Master. Fun!

We never made it to states -- we were always scrounging for team members, and usually ended up with about four people who actually studied, and five who filled seats.

Heh, that's what was so brilliant about Ac Dec. Since the team had to have people with a range of GPAs, slackers like me were like a secret weapon.

Yeah, that's where I did really well. My grades weren't great, but I had fun with Ac Dec and did really well on those tests. (Well, except for speech and interview, where I was generally the lowest-scoring of the native English speakers.) But we had a pretty small school, and there just weren't nine kids that we could find to put in the effort.