lum403 blog

I read about "5-a-day-books" at The Imagination Tree the other day and was very intrigued.

M loves books, but it's been a bit of a challenge to me since when I started to feel like I'm a reading machine or something. He just wants me to read, read, and read. I try to involve him by asking what he thinks about pictures or stories or whatever, but then he gets upset and sad because I interrupt stories.

And recently it went to the another level. One day he asked me to read a book and told me "I'll play with the cars while you read to me." ...What? It was a bit funny and I actually thought about the validity of this idea, but I told him that I wouldn't read him if he wanted to do something else. (I may try it in the future though, he has suggested it several times since then and I'm curious to see how it goes.)

So I was at my wits end how to read with M without me being like a CD player. "5-a-day-books" was a huge success! Reading short picture books that have easiy sentences to repeat out loud really worked. M was eager to read aloud with me! At the end of the week, he memorized two books and was able to "read" them to me.

Below were the week 1 books.

We speak Japanese at home but live in the states so I picked both Japanese and English books. I found that it's a little difficult to read the five books everyday as M has books he wants to be read and I don't want make the five books as a mandatory reading list, so some days we just picked a couple from the list and were done with it. I'll try simpler and shorter books than this week for the next so that it would be easier to go through five books in a day.

I'm so glad I stumbled upon this challenge! I really really like it, and I think M does too.