Be careful what you wish for; Boys and Reading

I love to read.  Always have, probably always will.  The loss of my Kindle on a plane a couple of weeks back - entirely my fault as I can't even blame the children for distracting me since I was sitting a couple of rows away from them and Husband - has left me bereft (pauses for heavy sigh and moment of quiet).  Or rather it did, until I realised I could download the Kindle app to the ipad and that all the purchases I made to date were stored in the ether - but still, I WANT MY KINDLE BACK, DAMMIT.

Anyway.  Where were we?  Oh yes, I love to read.  Boy #1 also loves to read and is a carbon copy of the bookworm I was at the same age.  By the way Mum; I finally get how frustrating it is to try and get your kids ready for school in the morning with one of them constantly glued to a book.  Boy #2 has, on the other hand, up until recently been more about drawing than reading.  The house is awash with carefully drawn pictures of A380 airplanes complete with the customisations he plans to add to them in the future when he is the engineer in charge of design at Boeing. Things like gardens, tennis courts, swimming pools, extra seats for the Super First Class section he's going to introduce - you know the type of thing.

These signs of his active imagination are great, but I have to admit to have been looking forward to the day when he discovers just how much fun reading can be.

Well, that day has arrived.  But rather than resulting in a calm and peaceful scene of both Boys sitting reading in perfect harmony, we now have another turf war on our hands.  Boy #1, you see loves to read stuff like The Hobbit, Harry Potter and such-like - but he's also partial to the odd comic and illustrated Asterix and TinTin book.

And guess which books are most attractive to a 7 year old brother just discovering the joy of books?

That sitting and reading in perfect harmony?  We'll get there, I'm sure.  Eventually.

When your children still think you can do ANYTHING...

The Boys' school has a used book fair on at the moment.  The basic premise is that the children comb through the shelves to find books they don't want anymore, and take them into school where they exchange  them for 'book bucks', which they can then swap for - you guessed it - more books.

So - an opportunity to rid ourselves of books that are too young a reader-age, and to get new books more appropriate to the Boys into the bargain?  Fantastic.

Obviously, we forgot all about it.

This necessitated a last minute rifle through the shelves and some hard decisions about which titles we loved too much to give away, even if they were way too young for the Boys these days.  At the final count we managed a total of 20 books to swap - many of which, it has to be said, had been acquired at previous book fairs and which I was only too happy to see go (Transformers or Pokemon, anyone?).

The Boys were delighted; this gave each of them a total of 10 book bucks to spend.  The only problem was that, having left it to the last minute, a lot of the best books had already gone and so the selection to choose from was somewhat thinner than they might have liked.  This meant that when he had chosen the books he wanted, Boy #2 still had one book buck left over.  He decided that rather than saving it for the next fair, he would - dear heart - spend it on me.

This is why, when I collected him from school the day before yesterday, he made me a gift of this book.

I like to think of it as evidence of his lofty ambition for me.

British Mummy Blogger of the Week

Evening all...

Every Sunday when I sit down to write this post (oh, all right, most Sundays, when I'm not swept up in back to school fever like I was last week, for example), I take a look through my secret-oh-so-secret notes to see which of the new blogs I've checked out recently I would like to nominate as this week's reading. And then, just to check I haven't missed anyone new, I visit the British Mummy Blogger's Ning member's section and take a look through that and visit a few more.

Normally that takes a while. (Suffice it to say it's a good thing I only have access to Russian tv as I have no distractions to lure me away from the task in-hand. Well, it's either that or watching my way through the last series of '24' again and since I didn't stay awake the first time I watched it, well, thank god for blogging is all I can say...)

However, this evening on my visit to the BMB member's page I hit paydirt with only the second blog I visited...

We're at that stage in Boy #1's education where reading is moving from being a chore to him to something he loves. I'm a bookworm myself so it's a delight to me to see him with his head buried in a book, even if it is about Ben 10 or PowerRangers rather than something more edifying (he is only 6, after all). So any hints on finding new books for him to read - or for me to read to him - are gratefully received, which is why when I read this blog I was immediately interested.

Natasha Worswick writes that her blog is:

'...about lots of things really, but it tends to focus on children’s books (the ones I’ve enjoyed or not), the publishing industry, children’s marketing and tracking my son Milo’s reading habits.'

I liked her post about hospital books, and ideas of titles you can use to entertain children on long journeys. And as for the link to the Q&A page of Andrew Stanton's site - brilliant. I will definitely be adding his books to the Boys' collection.

For the British Mummy Blogger's Ning click here. (Note: it says 'Mummy', but Dads can be members too).

Bed time stories...

Boy #1 is now reading a lot more easily. This is great, and we're working on improving his fluency still further - but there's a problem. Most days, at some point, I read to my sons on the sofa, and at least once a day this will be as a reward for Boy #1 having read to me first.

The thing is though, and you may have forgotten this if your children are now fluent readers, but when a child is first familiarising themselves with the process, they do tend to read slowly and in something of a monotone. The dramatisation and pauses for effect that become de rigeur when you're a parent with more than your fair share of am dram in your past are things that don't come naturally until later in life.

So the last few times when Boy #1 has finished reading the latest installment of The Magic Key or similar to me at the end of a long and tiring day, I have to admit; it hasn't been either of my children who have been taking a nap on the sofa...