Reading with Little Miss Muffet: June 2015

New Book Behavior

• "Read!" This month, at 1 1/2, Little Miss Muffet started to verbalize what she wants done with her books. Now when she flings a book at me, it is usually accompanied by a demand of  "Read!" or "Lap!" While she often changes her mind just a few pages into a book, it's nice to see her developing the vocabulary to talk about reading - and to ask for a story when she wants one. 

Current Favorites 

• Once Upon a Potty by Alona Frankel 
  We have not started potty training yet, but this was my favorite potty book as a kid, and we found a copy at a used book store that was in great condition, so we figured why not see what Miss Muffet thinks? And she loves it! She is very interested in Prudence, the main character, and even claps when Prudence successfully uses the potty. 
• Baby's Mother Goose illustrated by Alice Schlesinger 
  This tall board book is Miss Muffet's most frequently requested read-aloud right now. She is beginning to know some of the rhymes so well, she can fill in the blanks if I leave out words, and she spends a lot of time pointing at the characters in the illustrations and labeling whether they are boys, girls, babies, animals, and/or asleep. 
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr. and Eric Carle 
  Miss Muffet does not yet seem to understand that each color is a different entity, as evidenced by her identification of every color  as red. I took this book out in the hopes that it might help her start to make sense of the concept, and it became an instant favorite. The repetition makes it possible for her to fill in words as I read, which tends to keep her more interested than just reading it myself. She can also label almost all of the animals, and she learned the word "teacher" after just a couple of readings. This has been a long-time story time staple for me, so it's wonderful to see her falling in love with it, too! 

One Tip from Mom

• Act out your books! Toddlers are busy people, and sometimes they literally can't slow down long enough to sit through an entire story. With Little Miss Muffet, I have found that it helps during her "wilder" moments if we can act out a story together. We just borrowed a new book from the library: Baby Love by Angela DiTerlizzi. The baby in the story is described in terms of his body parts - tiny toes, sleepy eyes, etc. When I read it aloud to Miss Muffet, I asked her to follow along by pointing to each body part as it was mentioned. For the first couple of pages, I had to prompt her, but then she caught onto the game right away and really got into it. I also enjoyed it because there are several places in the book where the baby gives a hug or a kiss, and she happily shared one with me each time!