A while back, somebody was talking about dialect-limited rhymes

Over here in linguaphiles.

Here's another link, with a video of another child singing the song, the cutest I've ever seen who wasn't actually a relative of mine!

(Interestingly enough, just on a tangent here, I know of two or three other versions of that rhyme that are standard nursery rhymes in English, that I often have seen in Mother Goose compilations, or elsewhere.)

The other day I picked up a used book, Shoes from Grandpa. It's a cute cumulative story about a girl who gets all sorts of clothes in rhymes.

Except the author is clearly not speaking my dialect here, because she makes some rhymes that I can't make. Scarf and laugh rhyming, I recognize (though for me to make the rhyme would mean changing the vowel in both words), but what really took me by surprise is when she rhyme blouse and bows (like something tied in a bow, not like somebody bowing down). No matter how I work it in my mind, I can't see how they rhyme! Unless one or both of those words is pronounced *very* differently over the pond, not just a little like the earlier example.

Any insight here?

Now that Ana's willing to admit she can read a little, I want more books she can handle alone

(Not that I know how much she can really read, but I'm going off what she admits to.)

This means I want suggestions for books in two different categories:

1. Books without words, where the kid works out the story alone

2. Beginner books that are intended for early reading - I've heard of, say, Bob books, or republished Dick and Jane books, that's the sort of thing I mean. They don't have to be inspiring, they just have to be simple.

Any suggestions?

Oh, and I've added a lot of books to my various online catalogs, if you're interested in what the nieces already read.

I have more books in Amazon than the others because I also include books there that I don't actually own - ones we took out from the library or read at the bookstore, especially if we happened to decide *not* to get it and I know why. After all that effort I'm now slightly irked that so few people call my reviews helpful there. (Well. Not that much effort. I get lazy after the first two words!)