Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Books, Books, Books

We are a book worm kind of family. We love books. When I backpacked Europe the one thing that I missed about living out of a backpack was having my books around me. Ocoee has shown a real interest in books. I have read her a book pretty much every day since birth...and a few before birth.

Ocoee has been very lucky to receive lots and lots of books as gifts. My book club members gave her unique books as gifts after she was born. Each one had a story and reason why that person picked that book. As a book worm at heart this made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Below is a huge stack of books that Mark, from hubby's work passed along to us. There are many DR. Seuss books and local books as well. Alaska has amazing local childrens' authors and illustrators. One of our favorites is Sleeping Lady by Ann Dixon. We have also made it a habit to buy a new book from each place we visit. In Seattle we got A day at the Market by Sara Anderson.....such a lovely book!


We also received a great treat from grandma to Ocoee. She was able to dig through her attic and send hubby's old Serendipity books.

These are real treasures. They are in amazing shape and have some very relevant to our life titles, such as The Gnome from Nome and Maui Maui. The stories offer moral tales and beautiful illustrations. Hubby's favorite was Kartusch. He had such good memories of these books and now we can share them with Ocoee. They sale on ebay and some are consider collectibles.



As a young person I spent a lot of time outside playing...my parents were the types that said, "Go Outside!" often. The other times I was inside... I was reading. We didn't spend time watching TV. As an educator I credit this to my success in school. Even though my parents were not highly educated and we moved a lot from school to school, both my brother and I were always in the top percentage on the big nasty standardized test and both were in gifted programs.

Research shows that student achievement is linked to early exposure to reading. That is another reason why I am such a big supporter of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. This program gives kiddos free books, every single month, from birth to 5. Ocoee has already received several and we support efforts to fundraise for this cause whenever we can. If you have a kid of your own, or one in your life, I recommend you sign them up. My niece was signed up from birth and has a great book collection, just from this program.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou

Cheers
J


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