1000 Books Before Kindergarten challenge

I recently bought Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Lives Forever by Mem Fox. It is a very interesting and informative book about the benefits and joys of reading aloud to children. She says that "Children need to hear a thousand stories before they can begin to learn to read. Or the same story a thousand times!" So when I came across the 1000 Books Before Kindergarten challenge, I decided that we were in. It also seemed like a fun way to track just how much we were reading.

 Mem Fox's website has sections for parents, teachers, children and writers. Visit her site here. It is full of great tips, thoughts and information.

You can find out more about the 1000 Books Before Kindergarten here.

I was always surrounded by books as a child and enjoyed being read to. My greatest love has always been getting lost in a book. I loved reading to my older son when he was small. I would do silly voices for different characters and we'd get right into it. Once he grew out of it, he continued to read, but never to the passionate degree that I do. Little Bean already likes to cuddle up and read a book together, and I really hope that he becomes a hardcore bookworm like me (hopefully a Whovian & sci-fi geek too).

I've decided to track our progress by putting a list of the books we read on this blog. You can see our booklist here.

Here are some other great sources for information on children's books, including reading lists and my favourite online store to buy books:

The Book Depository - My favourite online bookstore. It has a HUGE range of books, great prices and free delivery worldwide. 

Children's Book Guide - Top 100 Children's Books of All Time

Growing Book By Book - a great site with book reviews, reading lists, reading themes, book-based activity ideas and lots more.

GoodReads - a great source for all things book related. There are reviews, booklists, information on authors, quizzes, quotes and trivia. You can see what other people are reading and share your own reading list. There's even an app where you can get book recommendations based on your reading history. GoodReads also has their own annual book awards. Here are their latest award winning children's books:

GoodReads Best Picture Books of 2014

GoodReads Best Middle Grade & Children's Books of 2014

What we're doing this week

This is what we got up to last week. Little Bean is still fascinated with bugs, so we continued with most of our activities and books from the previous week. We also added some new activities.

Little Bean loves pulling stuff out of the kitchen cupboards, so we direct him towards the section storing our plastic stuff. The other day he found a drink bottle and became obsessed with screwing the lid on and off. I ended up getting a plastic egg carton and a flip top storage container for him too and let him practise opening and closing them.

I found these great toys on Australian eBay. They were part of an 8 pack of wooden puzzles and cost around AU$55. After Little Bean had played with them for a while, he got the plastic egg carton out and started to put the wooden discs in the compartments.

Little Bean was playing on the floor and bumped a plastic toy cow. It started to spin and he loved it. He started to investigate how to spin the cow on purpose. Once he had it sussed, I added some other animals and objects for him to try spinning. Any that didn't spin were quickly tossed aside and he decided that the cow and a fish were the best. We've since found lots of different spinning toys and household items to explore, some purpose-made to spin and some that just happen to spin well.

A surprise addition to our activities this week were some plastic water bottles. I was crushing them up and putting them in a tub, ready to go in the recycling bin. Little Bean liked the noise it made and wandered over to watch. When I was done, he took the tub and sat down on the mat with it. He proceeded to put the bottles in and out of the tub over and over again. Occasionally he would play with the bottles and crinkle them too.

Little Bean has become interested in books with flaps. We've been reading these two books this week.

Little Bean loves singing and we often sing and do actions for nursery rhymes. 

I read "Hettie and the Fox" by Mem Fox to LB and my nephew as a bedtime story last week. It was a big hit. I loved doing different voices for each animal. Reading aloud to kids is so much fun. I am a huge Mem Fox fan, so I just bought her book about reading aloud to kids on eBay. I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to read it.