Kids and Books

Tonight we gathered together a stack of books and sat on the couch to read before bed.  My youngest is 2 1/2 and doesn't always sit the whole time.  He got up and got his container of cars out and sat on the floor in front of us playing for a bit, then came back to listen some more, then went in the kitchen for a few minutes only to come back and add a book to the top of the stack.  The book he added was a car shaped notebook that was blank inside except for some orange scribbles.

 I told him,  "This is very nice book but there are no words to read."

He answered, "Yes there are."

I looked at it again and asked it the orange scribbles were works and he nodded.  Then I asked if he wrote the book and he said, "I write it."

So here I am looking at orange scribbles trying to figure out what he thought his book was about.  I figured cars since that was the shape of the book and his current favorite toy.  I asked him if he wanted to tell the story but he said, "No, you read it."

So, I made up a story about a red, white and blue car that celebrated the 4th of July with loud fireworks that made him cover his ears (just like my son) and who went to the drive-in movie theater to watch a movie( just like we did) and then saw a parade.  I love that he wants to write and that he understands that the words on the page are the story!

I don't think you can ever read too much to your children.  My older two made up a game yesterday that they call library.  They both have shelves of books in their rooms, but they can visit each other and borrow a book from the other person's library.  They then spent a long amount of time reading those books so they could return them to borrow new ones.