Teach Your Child to Read: In One Million Easy Steps

I don't feel quite experienced enough in this whole parenting thing to be spouting out child-rearing advice, unless of course it's just plain obvious. Read to your kids. Read to them a lot.

This is a picture of our coffee table after a day of play and books and reading and "library". I recently complained that I am constantly cleaning up books, everyday restocking the bookshelf. My friend rightly said, "What a lovely problem to have!". Hmmm, yes. What a good problem indeed.

Yes, my girls play dress-up, have pretend restaurants and zoos; they even watch an occasional cartoon on You Tube, but I really see so much of their creativity, the questions they ask, the humor they "get" in watching TV coming from reading books.  I try to steer them to the "good books", not the "twaddle" that Charlotte Mason grieved over. And honestly, it's mostly because I enjoy reading some books ("Make Way for Ducklings", "Horton Hatches the Egg", etc) rather than others ("Ariel: A Tale of Forgiveness"). But some "twaddle" makes its way in and we make it through to find out just "what a princess should do" at the end. I suppose you cannot develop a literary critique without literature to criticize.

And of course, I don't mind the snuggle time.