Reading To Your Kid!

As many of you know, I was a writing major in college. As you may guess from that, I value words, reading, writing, books and everything else along those lines.  So to me, it’s important to find time to read to Dom on a regular basis. I shoot for daily, but that doesn’t always happen depending on how crabby he is and what we’re doing during the day. However, I still find time to do this when I can, because the benefits are huge. Reading books to your kid is really crucial and important for their language development. So today I thought I would share some of the books that Dom and I love to read. In no particular order, here are five of the books we really love right now.

1.The Going-To-Bed Book by Sandra Boynton

I don’t know exactly what it is about this book, but it’s fun and it’s cute. It’s a short and easy read, with entertaining colorful pictures. This is the book I’m most likely to give to Dom to look at by himself.

2. Hello, Animals! by Smriti Prasadam

This is one of our favorites. I could easily read this book to Dom three or four times in a row and he would keep paying attention. Additionally, it’s full of a lot of fun sounds that are really entertaining. This is actually a library book, but I keep thinking I’m going to have to buy a copy for our personal book collection.

3. My Daddy And Me by Amy Sklansky

Being a SAHM, it means I am the one that Dominic spends the majority of his time with. However, it’s important to me that Dom builds a good relationship with his dad. So while Nick is away, I like to read books like this to Dominic and talk about the fun things that dad will do with him when he gets home. This one is so cute and is a particular favorite. It talks about pairs of things that go together, just like dads and their children do.

4. Time for Bed by Mem Fox

This is a cute book that rhymes (which helps with language development). It’s all about mothers telling their various baby animals that it’s time for sleep. It’s a very cute book, in my opinion, and great to read before nap time or bedtime.

5. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle

This one is a favorite for us just because it’s classic and it helps teach colors. Really, who doesn’t love Eric Carle?

Reading “Moo Baa La La La” – another great book!

And here are my tips for reading with a little kid!

1. Try and pick books that they can touch and play with without the fear of them getting wrecked. This is why I pick board books. Occasionally, I will read to him from nicer picture books, but I don’t want him to rip the pages of those, so not very often.

2. Read to them at a time when they are in a good mood and have all their needs met. I.e. if they are hungry, feed them before you read to them.

3. Don’t try and force them to sit there too much longer than their attention span. I just find that it’s better to read to him a little bit and maybe not finish the whole story, than force him and sit there and be crabby about it. I want reading to be a positive experience for him, so I try and gauge his interest level. Sometimes he just wants to be moving about and I know there will be downtime later where it would be a better time to read to him.

Tell me, what are you favorite books to read to your kids? Or, if you don’t have kids, what were your favorite books as a kid?

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you click on the link and buy the book, a small portion of the cost of your book will come back to me. Thanks for supporting me!

10 Finds for You – August 15th

Okay, so one thing that I do is that I love to share other people’s articles and content. Why? Because there are a lot of great things out there. So periodically, I’ll do what I’m doing today, which is leave you a list of things I recommend reading (or watching). Just a few notes because I’m just going to leave the links and not add any of my extra commentary, leaving a link here does not mean I agree with everything on the site – I just think the particular link is interesting whether or not I agree with it. If you want to discuss any one in particular, leave a comment and I’ll happily discuss it with you and what I think about it.

1. What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?

2. Couple to attempt 50-mile swim across Lake Michigan

3. Women Scientists Still Face Discrimination

4. College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equality

5. Sentencing Juveniles

6. ‘The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness’ Author Brianna Karp Offers Advice to Young People on the Streets

7. One-third of tween clothes are sexy, study finds

8. TTC & IF: WHO Annoyance

9. Sex and Self-Esteem: A Big Boost for Men, Not So Much for Women

10. Fathers: Key to Their Children’s Faith

Happy reading!

Melissa

Fascinating Facts About Children’s Books

I don’t have a lot of time today because I’ll have to be out the door soon, but I thought I would leave you with a link to fascinating facts about children’s books. A lot of times, we read books as children but we have no idea all the larger messages at work within them or the points that the author was trying to make. Take Dr. Suess for example – his work was political but as a kid you don’t realize that Yertle the Turtle is talking about Hitler or that The Butter Battle Book is addressing the arms race. You just enjoy the stories.

So I hope you enjoy these fun facts found here. I know I certainly learned a thing or two. I think my favorite is the Alice in Wonderland used to be banned in parts China because the animals could talk and only humans are meant to talk. Anyways, let me know your favorite fact below!

An Opportunity to Help Out With Domestic Violence

A while back my sister introduced me to this really cool company called Sevenly. Basically what Sevenly does is design t-shirts. But these aren’t just any shirts. These are shirts that seek to raise awareness and funds for different charities around the world. Each week they produce a shirt for a charity. These shirts are only available for 7 days. And for every shirt sold, $7 goes to the charity.

I picked this week to bring Sevenly to your attention because these week’s shirt is bringing in proceeds for Sheltering Wings, which is an organization that helps women and children involved in domestic violence. So I thought that it tied into my purpose with this blog quite nicely.

You can watch their video below:

So far this week they’ve raised over $7,000 and it’s only Wednesday. If you want to help out, you can find them here. If you sign up for their e-mails, you’ll be notified what the new shirt is every week. They are doing really great things. A few weeks ago, they raised over $20,000 for Autism Speaks.

Disclosure: Sevenly did not ask me to write this post, I did it because I wanted to. I am affiliated with Sevenly as an ambassador, but that is a volunteer program that I signed up for because I think Sevenly is a great company and I want to help get the word out.

The Women in Time’s Most Influential List 2011: Amy Chua

Amy Chua. Maybe you don’t recognize the name, but if I say Tiger Mom, would you recognize that?

Let’s learn a little more about her:

• She is a law professor at Yale.
• She wrote a memoir called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother which was about raising American kids the Chinese way.
• Her book started a huge debate over how to parent your kids.
• Her daughter has responded to the criticism of her mother by standing up for her mother.

From http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2066367_2066369_2066449,00.html

If nothing else, she is influential because she started this huge conversation about how we should parent and what effect that has on our kids. I think having that conversation is important, regardless of what you think of her style. It started a conversation that needed to be had – what kind of parenting is best for our kids? It’s something that should be talked about. I can’t say anything yet about what I think of the memoir because I haven’t read it yet (but I plan to at some point) and I shouldn’t judge a whole book based on the comments of people online. But was she influential in this past year? Definitely.

Oh and because she’s influential for writing a book, here is a link to excerpts of it and at the end, the book itself:

• ‘Tiger Mother’ explains her strict parenting – books – Family Health – TODAY.com
• Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior – WSJ.com
• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother*

Sources:

• Amy Chua’s “Tiger Daughter” Responds to Critics – Eye on Parenting Blog – CBS News
• Hay Festival 2011: Amy Chua interview – Telegraph
• Amy Chua – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

*I am an Amazon Affiliate, so if you decide to buy the book after clicking on the link, part of the proceeds will come back to me. Thanks for supporting me!

 

Forced Abortions

I wish I could say that sex selection abortions didn’t happen. I really wish I could. Because most of the time, when an abortion is the choice to be made, it’s because the baby is a girl. It happens in places like India and China. Especially  China, where population police control the number of children you are allowed to have. Why is the rest of the world so slow to say something about it? It is girls that are being effected, more than anything, because of the high cultural preference for a boy.

I can not imagine what these mothers go through, how terrified they must be, knowing that if they get pregnant again or even if they get pregnant the first time and it’s a girl, someone might force them to have an abortion or pay an amount of money they can’t afford just to keep the child.

This is a truly sad situation that needs to be stopped. Girls are dying merely because they are girls. Watch this video about one mother in China and her daughters.

Sexualizing Little Girls

This product is a bit old and I couldn’t find it on Abercrombie and Fitch’s website anymore (probably because it’s winter and they’re no longer selling swimsuits) but I pull it out of the archives, so to speak, to make a larger point that I sort of hinted at yesterday.

You see, over the summer, Abercrombie and Fitch released a padded bikini top aimed at girls as little as 7. 7 years old? And Abercrombie and Fitch already think they need padding? Just why? Why are we in such a hurry to turn our little girls into women? Childhood is a time that you are supposed to enjoy – the time before you start to feel pressures from society about how you look and about how you should act and everything like that. We are letting our little girls down by pushing being sexy on them at such a young age. They deserve better. They deserve to just be little girls who don’t need any padding because they don’t need boobs.

It’s time to put our foot down and say these things are unacceptable. Let little girls be little girls.