My now 9 year old daughter is a reader. She really enjoys it and spends a good chunk of time doing it without me asking her to. So naturally, she’s gotten good at it, has read a lot, and has developed tastes in what she likes and doesn’t like. Now normally this wouldn’t be a huge issue, there are tons of books in the world, right? True. However, she’s only just turned 9, and I’d like to maintain her innocence for as long as I can. (Selfish, I know)
So I got her this book a while ago, and as I mentioned here, it has done a great job of giving her ideas of what to put on her TBR list.
The book does a good job of not only dividing books by genre, but they also divide them by age group. So when my child comes to me with a list of books that she wants that are outside of her age range, what am I to do?
Start a Mother/Daughter Book Club, that’s what! The idea was a seed in my head, but CeCeLibrarian told me she did something similar with her daughter, so I was on it. My daughter chose, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, so we went to the library and since there were 2 copies, that’s what we came home with.
Initially, since I had never read it, my goal was to read with her, and then read ahead on my own, so as to be prepared for any inappropriate or touchy issues. I’ll be honest, me reading ahead only lasted a couple of days, so each night I was taking my chances. There was one part of the story where the kids mentioned drug addicts, and my daughter asked me what that meant, so I had to explain that, but otherwise, everything was age appropriate.
It did take us a while to get through the book, we had to renew the book a couple of times. Most of the time we alternated reading pages, and occasionally I read an entire chapter while she followed along in her book. I thought she would struggle with the fact that the book takes place 50 years ago, but she really enjoyed the book, and I really enjoyed reading it with her.
Although I used this mother/daughter book club as a way to kinda monitor what my child was reading, you could easily do the same for a variety of reasons. This is just another suggestion for your quest in #RaisingReaders.
Raising Readers... 