My daughter loves to read. That should come as no surprise to my family since her parents are both read-a-holics. I have really enjoyed seeing Beth come into her love of books. She has her favorites – she’s really into the Rainbow Magic Fairy books and the Magic Treehouse books right now. But she also loves when a new issue of the Friend comes and she basically reads it from cover to cover.
But there is something that she doesn’t enjoy reading as much – Baggie Books. Her school has a reading program where they achieve different levels of reading by bringing books (in ziploc bags) home to read to their families. She gets a new book every weekday to bring home and read. These are small readers that get harder/longer as they level up. Actually Beth is on the higher achievement now and brings home 2 books to read every day. Anyways, she’s never really too enthused by these book choices. She still reads them out loud and does a good job and sometimes she does enjoy some of the stories. But a few weeks ago, she brought home a book that interested her so much. It surprised me a lot – enough for me to stop what I was doing (making dinner) and actually sit down next to her and discuss it.
The name of the book was Telling Stories Through Art and she kept reading it and exclaiming things and showing me the pictures. Almost every paragraph ended with “Wow. That’s so interesting!” It was adorable to hear that coming out of her mouth. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised that the history and paintings of indians would interest her. Growing up, many of my family vacations were to visit historical sites and indian ruins. It’s something that my Dad really enjoys and I always enjoyed it too. But its also something that I haven’t really shared with my children before. I’ve never really visited with them about historical sites and stuff and obviously its something that I need to remedy. Beth hasn’t stopped talking about the indian carvings and paintings and how she wanted to see some “for real.” I am definitely going to have to do some research and see if there is some places we can visit. How neat to see that Beth is experiencing a new interest in history. I can’t wait to visit some new places with her and I hope this love just grows. I think it will be really fun for her to learn and grow through the history of our country and the history of the people on earth and even the history of the people in the scriptures. I’m excited to share more of this with her!
