World Book Day

I make no secret of the fact that I love kids books to bits - the colours, the adventures, the fun, the fantasy (Julia Donaldson, Eric Carle, Janet & Allen Alberg - wow)... and my little Charlie may only be 20 months, but I couldn't wait to start introducing him to the amazing world of the book-worms and start buying him books.... and now he kind of has stacks!

He's not interested in sitting and listening to a story yet. I try every now and again but he gets very easily distracted when there's too much text and I'm babbling too much! He likes it short and to the point. He still loves his "That's not my" collection and his other touchy-feely books. But his favorites at the moment are books with lots and lots of different themes inside - a different theme to every page; transport, animals, kitchen items, clothing, in the garden, body parts, colours, numbers, food etc with word labels. He loves picking out what he knows.

I had to do something for world book day - and as we've just got Tuff Tray - I could fulfill my first urge to use it! So I filled it with little plush characters, and some of his favourite books. I also brought out the wooden alphabet train that his Great-Grandma bought him - just choosing the letters ABC to begin with. He can count to 10, but he doesn't confidently know any letters yet.  I've seen him start to take an interest in the letter magnets on the fridge, so I bought him his first long ABC book this week which goes all the way to Z.

He dived straight into the Tuff tray and was immediately attracted.... to the train!
Ah- oops. But he did sit in the tray and listen as I held up each train letter and used linguistic phonetics "Ah, ber, ker" and pointed to an item he loves on each page. Ah for apple - Ber for baby - Ker for cat. He was interested for a bit, but then naturally wanted to play with the train, so we'll come back to that. I'm thinking about getting him an ABC sing along CD so he can learn a song to help him remember. And a couple of them educational posters for his room.

He's doing brilliantly with recognising his colours, and he's started telling us which colour spoon (it's really a rounded fork) he wants to use with his meals - which can be 3 at once! He can also recognise some numbers, which are usually 4, 7 and 6 but sometimes he'll shout "TEN" and be pointing to the number 10 on a train timetable screen. Letters don't seem to interest him as much as numbers or colours and that's fine for now.