Do you read to your children at night? (schools, paying, grade)

[artyst]

i read to my son every night from a very early age....probably started at around 2 with those simple cardboard books and little soft cover books about farm animals. he memorized those right off and appeared to be reading because he knew all the words on each page! i loved dr seuss so i bought most of those books and read them to him, he loved them also. some nights when he was 3 or 4 i was too tired to read but he would insist. he loved it. he also enjoyed pop up books so we had some of those. and he liked silly books like, "there's a hair in my dirt." eventually he liked the goosebumps books so i bought almost all of those, every time a new one came out he had to have it, and he would read a chapter and i would read a chapter. looking back, reading to my son and with my son is one of my fondest memories of his childhood. my mom read to me. strangely enough my favorite book was called, "the boy who drew cats" and i ended up being an artist! lol! i insisted she read that book to me night after night, i never got sick of it. another one i remember her reading to me was "little black sambo" and "ping." i think it was my memory of being read to that inspired me to want to read to my child. also, it's one of the best ways to start your child on the road to being a good reader and writer.

[artyst]

DubbleT i think giving books for a shower gift is an excellent idea!

[uptown_urbanist]

Originally Posted by DubbleT

Slightly off topic, but curious, do you all think it's odd that to give books of nursery rhymes as a baby shower gift? I've done it a couple of times and received a few snickers and strange looks, so I've gone back to giving boring, predictable stuff. My kids were hearing Mother Goose from the get go, so I didn't think it was all that strange, but maybe it is?

No, I don't; I think the odd thing is that others at those showers would think books are an odd gift! We got books of all kinds, including Mother Goose, and I regularly give books as shower presents. Since having a kid I've actually started to give books as gifts even more than before I had a baby. I think they're an ideal shower gift.

The only shower book I don't give anymore is Good Night Moon; we ended up with five copies, so now I'll only give it to people if I know for sure that they don't already own a copy. (but it makes the perfect book present if they don't have it, and certainly has/is a favorite in our house)

[GoCUBS1]

Our home is filled with books. I've read to my kids almost every night since they were born. I enjoy it as much as they do and have so many wonderful memories of this.... We've read all the classics. They are now 8 and 11 and excellent readers but we still sit together each night to read.

I'll read a short story, or some poetry, or song lyrics, or a magazine/newspaper article, or some educational text I want to sneak in. Or, I'll read excerpts from the Jr. Great Books (or sometimes The Great Books). We'll spend time discussing the topics covered. Then, they'll each read their own books for an hour or so. Sometimes, I'll check out a copy of the same book so I can read it along with them. My son and I are now making our way through the Harry Potter series and have had lots of great discussions on this. Strangely, I see no end to us reading together (or maybe I just don't want to think about it... it's too sad! ).

[Aconite]

Somewhere in the late nineties there was a study which said boys were more likely to be readers if their dads read to them. I don't know if it's ever been substantiated or disproven, but it was enough to designate Mr. Aconite the bedtime story purveyor in the household. I did backup when he traveled, but it was mostly his ritual, and I was happy to let him do it.

He read to the kids until they were about eight or nine, I think, at which time he got a job that made that difficult. They're both avid readers themselves, now.

[TeaJay]

My husband and I read to our 2.5 year old daughter every night. We may not have started at Day 1, but we were pretty close! Fortunately she will not go to sleep without us reading; sometimes I am so tired at the end of the day that I don't want to do it even though I know it's very, very important. She chooses any 4 books and we end with nursery rhymes. All her books are relatively short (Fancy Nancy, the If You Give a Mouse... series, Jane Yolen's Dinosaur series, Curious George, the Brown Bear, Brown Bear collection, Chicka Chicka 123, and a few others).

As she gets older we will branch into chapter books and longer picture books.

And I love to buy books as baby/shower gifts. I took a class on children's lit not too long ago so I know of titles that are good but not as well-known so I don't have to worry as much about giving a book that is already owned.

[flik_becky]

Originally Posted by DubbleT
Slightly off topic, but curious, do you all think it's odd that to give books of nursery rhymes as a baby shower gift? I've done it a couple of times and received a few snickers and strange looks, so I've gone back to giving boring, predictable stuff. My kids were hearing Mother Goose from the get go, so I didn't think it was all that strange, but maybe it is?

Originally Posted by uptown_urbanist

No, I don't; I think the odd thing is that others at those showers would think books are an odd gift! We got books of all kinds, including Mother Goose, and I regularly give books as shower presents. Since having a kid I've actually started to give books as gifts even more than before I had a baby. I think they're an ideal shower gift.

The only shower book I don't give anymore is Good Night Moon; we ended up with five copies, so now I'll only give it to people if I know for sure that they don't already own a copy. (but it makes the perfect book present if they don't have it, and certainly has/is a favorite in our house)

Some of the cutest books to give for baby showers are the Peter Rabbit series by Beatrix Potter. The little hard covered books are perfect for little hands, the bigger words will help to build strong vocabulary with young children, and the little paintings are full of visual interest that really helps to bring the story to life. I don't know how I forgot about these...my first son's favorites, but they all loved them. He used the words he learned (he's always been my little vocab king), among them started calling me Madame. Other cute ones are Animal Babies books.

I also agree, anyone who thinks reading to babies is stupid is really uneducated. Kids even at that age have brains that are obtaining information and using to help their brains grow. It broadens their vocabulary and helps them become strong readers later. My mother was one that did not see the point in reading to a child under the age of 2. Even when she thought they were ready, if she was reading a book with a word she believed they would not understand, she subsituted it because was not educated on the fact that using new and big words when kids are small acutally helps them learn the skill of being able to figure out the word from the surrounding story.

My kids did not like Good Night Moon. They hated it. I'm just gald that it was a library checkout and not one I paid for!

Thinking of our library...I must say that I am EXGTREMELY disappointed with our library's children's book selection. About 25-30% were all about Santa books. We celebrate Christmas but we DO NOT include santa as part of that. There were ZERO stories of old..the real St. Nicholas (who wasn't even called a Saint until after his death) or where the traditions of Christmas trees and stockings come from, or what the solstice symbolized, or what the 12 days of Christmas stand for and what greener being placed in houses meant with stories around all that, no to mention the repeative nature of these books. It is VERY confusing to my children who have been taught where these traditions really come from. They know that before Twas the Night Before Christmas and the Coke company's rendering of santa, Ol' Saint Nick was a white guy flying a horse drawn sleigh with his black slave that beat bad kids (and still celebrated as so in some countries).

They don't understand why people keep a tradition linked to slavery though while at the library they wonder why they can't find better books and more variety. You can hear them leafing through the books, "Ugh! Another Santa Book!"

Anyway, point is, the books SUCK and most have weak stories that my kids have no interest in. I recall DD going in when she first got her library card when she had just turned 5. She would check out around 40 books every visit, once a week, and return them, her goal to complete the challenge in four months.

Even though they had thousands of children's books, she ran out of reading material before obtaining her goal of 500 books (a number she thought was worth a new bike at the end of her kindergarten reading challenge.) We finally had to go into chapter books and get some stories where she got a book credit for every chapter she read but then again, she was not really interested in the books at the library set aside for beginning chapter readers either. She did not like the Magic Tree House series, Romona series, Goosebumps, ect. If there were books on animals though, it was another story, that is until we started the Series of Unfortunate Events and others like them.

[TabulaRasa]

I was always read to as a child. Every night, before bed, my dad read to my siblings and I, all kinds of different books and stories - lots of classics, lots of fairytales, anything we wanted, really. Lots of times, it was longer books, maybe a chapter or two a night...Old Yeller, Charlotte's Web, that sort of thing. Not so much the Good Night, Moon or Where the Wild Things Are type books for storytime, although we read those on our own. When I got older, I would still hang out in the room when he read to my younger siblings, and do my homework or read on my own, sort of listening with a half-ear, just because it was a comforting, familiar part of my routine, and a really good part of my childhood. I have really great, warm, pleasant memories of being read to. Very important bonding time, and instilled a great love of reading. I constantly read to my students, and will definitely read to my children.

I learned to read by being read to, as most children who are strong readers do. I was read A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson probably daily while I was learning to talk and as I grew. It was a beautiful edition with wonderful illustrations. Before I knew what words on a page were, I had all the poems memorized in the order they were read to me, and knew what poem was what by the illustrations. At an age when most children don't even talk in full sentences, I could recite "The friendly cow, all red and white..." and "Oh, how do you like to go up in a swing" and the like, verbatim. Then I started to connect the words I heard and could say with the symbols on the page, and that's how I learned to read, very, very early. It's hard to imagine most, if any, kids today knowing what "the pleasant land of counterpane" even means, but it's how I learned to read. I'm very fortunate that I was raised by bookish parents.

[golfgal]

Originally Posted by Jake Ryan

I read to my 17 month old every night. She hands me a book, well actually she hands me the SAME books every night before bedtime and I read them. Mostly Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham is her current favorite. She is also a fan of The Five Little Monkey series

I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am

We actually did NOT read to our kids before bed-that was made up story time-usually DH because he is more creative than I am. For a while the kids wanted stories about when they were "little". I think DS17 was on that kick for about a year-he was only about 6 at the time so there wasn't a whole lot of material to draw from. We read to them frequently during the day.

Now they are 17, 14, 14 and they all read before bed, on their own.

[Aconite]

We never ran out of books because the older girls insisted on "Ferdinand the Bull" over and over and over...I can still recite the thing from memory, 25 years later. Munro Leaf has no idea what he wrought (well, especially since he's dead, but you know what I mean).

With the younger kids it was "Scuffy the Tugboat" and "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". They also liked Good Night, Gorilla - Peggy Rathmann, which is a picture book without words. I think part of that was getting to act out the story, though, which tended to wind them up rather than calm them down.