strong, smart and wordy
Filed Under Stuff, Tips & Tricks | January 18, 2010
What encourages lifelong learning, strengthens your family relationship and is lots of fun? Reading to your children. In honour of Family Literacy Day which is coming up on January 27th, we wanted to share some ideas for fun activities to help develop your tot’s literacy skills, find out about family literacy events across Canada and three books that will provide you with myriad inspiration for what to read with your kids.
Author Kathleen Odean is a librarian and former member of both the Newbery and Caldecott Award committees. For those of you who may not be as obsessed with children’s literature as we are, let’s just say that the announcements of these two annual awards is akin to the buzz of excitement before the Academy Awards. The following three books from Odean effectively cover all your reading bases.
Great Books for Babies and Toddlers has synopses for over 500 books. The titles are aimed at kids from zero to three and they emphasize the importance of nursery rhymes, songs, and picture-story books.
Great Books for Girls is aimed at girls from two to fourteen, these are books that celebrate girls and women who are strong, courageous and capable of facing life’s challenges. Sample topics cover folktales, biographies, novels, poetry and magazines. There’s also a useful section on growing up and sexuality.
Great Books for Boys is similar to the Girls book in the number of titles, topics and age range. However, this book includes significantly more non-fiction titles since boys’ reading tastes often gravitate toward information books on science, hobbies, history and the like. Fiction titles include topics such as humour, sports, sci-fi, and survival stories.
Here’s hoping these books are instrumental in instilling a lifelong love of reading in you and your children!
Helen Moore is a children’s librarian who is the past Chair of the Canadian Library Association Amelia Picture Book Award. She’ll be taking a break from her duties as yoyomama’s kiddie lit expert as she’s adding twins to her brood in March.
2 Responses to “strong, smart and wordy”
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Let us know what you think or share your great finds with us so we can share them with other Vancouver mothers!
Great posting, thank you yoyomama. Your message brought this poem to mind… “You many have tangible wealth untold: caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, richer than I you can never be – I had a mother who read to me.” Gillian Strickland.
Check out this link for suggestions to encourage your children to read – http://ce.byu.edu/cw/womensconference/archive/2005/pdf/elizRicks.pdf
Here’s to Family Literacy Day!
Cheers
Ruth Kewin
Thank you for reminding me about this author. I used her Great Books for Girls extensively and am now just going through Great Books for Boys for my 5-year-old. I also blog on children’s lit at http://pragmaticmom.com. You might like my blog post: Favorite Picture Books You’ve Never Heard Of.
pragmaticmom