Documenting Delight: day three hundred and thirty five {discovering new places to read}

This month we completed another project in My Little Bookcase’s Book Adventure. This month’s task was to discover new places to read. Many of the reading spots we found happened with no or limited planning. It was fun to think outside of the box and highlight to the kids that reading can happen just about anywhere!

 

 

 

 

Documenting Delight: day two hundred and thirty {Book of the year awards + meeting an author}

Today marked the first day of the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week. Finn and I braved the cold weather (In Finn’s words: “Mummy it is such a miserable day!”) and headed out to the National Library of Australia to hear the announcement of the CBCA’s Book of the Year winners. The event tied in really nicely with Project #6 in My Little Bookcase’s The Little Book Adventure. Project #6: Meet an author or illustrator, encouraged families to find and meet a children’s author or illustrator at a book event during the month of August. With local children’s authors signing their books after the announcement, we were able to successfully complete this month’s Book Adventure (....after missing the last coulple of Projects). Completing this project was a simple task but one that made for a lovely outing for Finn & I and bought him a little closer to understanding who is behind a book or collections of books.

Before the Book Award winners were announced we spent some time in the National Library’s beautiful bookstore. It gave us time to read through a couple of the shortlisted titles we hadn’t had the chance to view previously. The two that struck a chord with Finn the most were ‘A bus called Heaven’ by Bob Graham and ‘The Runaway Hug’ by Nick Bland. To find out not long after our mini reading session that these two books won Book of the Year for their separate categories wasn’t really a big surprise. Both are beautiful books with heartwarming endings.

{taking in the pictures from 'a bus called heaven'. finn was quickly drawn in by the intricate illustrations}

{i love how finn draws his shoulders in when he is reading. it's almost like he is trying to get closer to the pages}

After the official announcement we returned to the bookstore and I told Finn that he could pick out one of the shortlisted books. He chose ‘A bus called heaven’. I had to restrain myself from picking up ‘A runaway hug’ too. We also chose a book written by local author Stephanie Owen Reeder for her to sign. Finn decided that he would like to give the book, ‘Colour My World’ to Harper. Finn approach Stephanie and they had a lovely chat about colours and how to spell his sister’s name. After the meeting Finn was so excited to return home and show Harper her new book with “the lady’s writing inside it”. 

{meeting stephanie owen reeder & finding delight in her feather pen!}

{a special message for harper}

 Completing this project was a lovely way to extend Finn's understanding of authors, and of coarse it is always a treat to add a couple of gorgeous books to our bookshelves. 

{Spreading our love of books}

Back in February we started My Little Bookcase’s The Little Book Adventure. This month saw us working on Project two, Spread your love of books. The brief was to borrow a book or collection of books from your library and leave a note inside detailing what you liked about the book. Cool concept hey?

As we make our way through this 10 month adventure I am enjoying completing the tasks in partnership with Finn & Harper. It isn’t about me whipping up activities and presenting them to my kids, both projects so far have pushed me to get them involved from beginning to end. This is as much their Book Adventure as it is mine.

So after a month of getting to know our latest batch of library books we sat down to have a chat about the things Finn and Harper liked about the books we borrowed. As we chatted I jotted down their responses. While Jackie from My Little Bookcase kindly provided us with a letter head, I knew that I want to somehow combine our letters with photographs. When I suggested the idea to Finn & Harper that they use the library books to play a game of peek-a-boo I thought Harper would go bananas for it and I would have to drag Finn through the mini-shoot. How wrong I was. To my great surprise, my boy who usually shouts “Put the camera away Mummy!” at any sighting on my beloved Canon, completely hammed it up in front of the camera. Harper on the other hand was completely disinterested and rolled around on the floor whenever my camera came near her.

{The one and only shot I got of Miss Harper}

Once I had the shots I added the letter underneath the image using photoshop, printed them and attached them with bluetak to the inside of each book.

{Letters attached to the books}

{All bagged up and ready to head back to the library}

The books have been returned and I can’t stop thinking about the little surprises that are waiting to be found by a small collection of Canberra Kids.

{Getting creative with our book space}

In conjunction with the National Year of Reading I am participating in My Little Bookcase’s Book Adventure. To be precise my family is participating in this project as the set tasks aim to draw participation from all family members.  Project one, Getting creative with book storage, aimed to get families to re-arrange/re-design their book storage to make books more accessible to their children. Since purchasing our own home late last year this has been something that I have been working towards in both Finn & Harper’s rooms. Back in December we finished Harper’s forward facing book shelves so this project prompted me to change things around in Finn’s room.

Finn’s bookshelf before the project looked like this:

Lots of books, but no real order to them. Another thing about Finn, he loves order. Craves it and is sometimes put out that the rest of his family don’t feel the same way ;)

Recently Finn has been requesting that we collect books from his bookshelf and take them to other parts of the house for a solid reading session; on the grass in the backyard, in the loungeroom or the most prized reading spot, in Mummy and Daddy’s bed. I thought that placing some plastic tubs in the shelving spaces would in aide us to quickly grab a box and head to a new location. I also planned to tie it in with a idea I saw on Pinterest. In this article it gave the suggestion to divide your child’s book collection into catergories/genres. I have been talking to Finn about the difference between Fiction and Non-fiction books so I thought this new way would assist him in grasping the concept.

It was quite easy to get the kids involved in setting up the new system. For Finn I only had to use the word “organising” and he was ready to go, for Harper I told her we were going to make “tall book towers on Finn’s bed”. Using her hands and building towers. Tick. She was in too.

{Book sorters at work}

{Books, books, books!}

We set to work taking all the books off his shelf, apart from his hardcover books. I was happy for them to remain filed spine out as Finn is able to locate most of these books by their height or spine colour.

Once all the books were on the bed I told Finn and Harper that we needed to search for all the Non- fiction books. Finn was quick to pick up that these books usually had photographs in them or on the cover and diligently looked for them. For the next box we created a ‘Construction Books’ box to house all of Finn’s books on diggers, trucks, dumpers and the like. The boy is obsessed and I didn’t realise how many books under this subject he had until we put them all in the box. As Finn is starting to talk and ask about authors I thought it would be a good idea to collate all the titles from the Authors that he loves (Stephen Michael King, Oliver Jeffers, Mem Fox, Pamela Allen, Jeannie Baker to name a few). The last box was for remaining ‘Fiction Books’. The book sort out also allowed Finn to look at books that may be more suited to his sister's room (younger board books) or to donate to our local Op-shop. He was happy to move some books on, and Harper was happy to receive some.

{Sorted and labelled}

One week in the boxes are working well. Finn chooses one book box a day and we source out a new reading location to look through and read some of the books in the box. Of coarse we don’t always stick with the book box themes. Sometimes Finn will grab a mixture of books and then return them to their original box (with a little help).

The end product:

{Above the bookshelf: Little Golden books, Golden book stacking blocks & Thomas story books}

{On the wall above the bookshelf: A new wall hanging}