I have a longer compute to work everyday than I desire. Sometimes this is a good thing; unwinding problems and difficulties, having good conversations on the phone with family and friends, and sometimes even day dreaming about everything I just want to get done in life.
Well, the other day I had this daydream about what my children get out of story time. Seeing my kids pick out a book every night and then seeing their expressions and listening to their questions just really gets me. It’s such special quality time spent together.
I began to feel sorry that we missed out on the Summer Reading Program at the library this year. July just came and went so fast! I was also possibly getting a little tired of our personal collection.
Last summer we did summer reading at our local library. The library’s goal was to record the books you read. The children had to be accountable with the librarians, coming back every week to check in on their reading. At check in time they would get free prizes or coupons and depending on the child’s age they may have a special program to encourage age appropriate stories. It was a great program, but sadly we only got to attend about three sessions with my crazy work schedule and a vacation demand from work.
My girls had a long list of books from their summer reading. However, I was disappointed that none of these books became favorites. None of these books were even deemed “good-enough” to buy a personal copy. So over the winter I reverted back to our personal assortment of children’s books, which I have to say are all really good ones.(Probably because they are either personal copies I had as a child or new ones my Mother had knowledge about, having been an elementary school teacher for years.) Now we have read the ones on the shelves MANY times. This feels wonderful to me! These books are friends. We know them well, even though we may be more partial to one for a few weeks, we always go back and revisit. We love our collection and are selective with our ever growing collection.
So my daydream carried me to working on finding better reading material for my girls. I decided I needed to scour the internet. So I did a bit of research and found some new things I wanted to investigate further. I brainstormed a little experiment. I desire to know the literature and more about the author of these great books I read my children. So I’m going to read, read, read, as always, but to specialize in one author a month and their literature. I have made this list in no particular order, but most books I know my girls would enjoy/or have already, and we would like to read more of their works.
The Month of August we will investigate Tomie dePaola
Library Books:
Strega Nona
Strega Nona Meets Her Match
Strega Nona’s Harvest
Big Anthony: His Story
The Knight and the Dragon
My short biography of Tomie dePaola is that he an award decorated author and illustrator. For more than 40 YEARS he has worked on over 200 books. Now that’s what I call experience! Read more about him at http://www.tomie.com/ .
At the end of the month I will return with a complete report on how each book read was received and the next months featured author and book list. Happy Reading!!
