I Like Things by Margaret Hillert, illustrated by Lois Axeman, 1982.

This is a cute little picture book about the fun of collecting things.  A young girl talks about the things that she collects and why she likes them.

She enjoys collecting all kinds of things with different shapes, sizes, and colors.  Sometimes, she likes to sort the things in her collections, like buttons, by color or size.

Sometimes, her father helps her with her stamp collection.  She also likes to find seashells and rocks at the beach.  Sometimes, she and her friend trade sports cards from their collections.

At the end of the story, the girl asks readers what kinds of things they like, so adults can use the story to get kids to talk about what they like to collect.

I thought it was interesting how the girl put one of the bigger rocks in her collection into a jar that was partly full of water so that the water would act as a magnifier, making the rock look bigger.

One thing I noticed is that the girl never refers to the objects in her collections by name.  Mostly, she just talks about what she does with them using very simple words.  I think that’s to make the book easier for younger children.  There is a word list in the back of the book of all of the words used in the story, and there are only 64 different words.