Daddy H is Swedish, mummy I is Spanish. Somehow, we both ended up working in Baden, a big town close to Zürich, in Switzerland. We got to know each other in the Swiss mountains back in 2008 and we are together since 2009.
When we decided to have kids, it was very important for us to pass along our respective heritages, and our mother tongues were definitely an important part of them. We decided to follow the One-Parent-One-Language system: H speaks only Swedish with the kids, I speak only Catalan to them (I also read to them in Spanish – I was raised bilingual). H and I speak English to each other. And, as M goes to day care in Swiss-German, he adds a bit of it to our daily life.
On our day-to-day, the kids only get exposure to our mother tongues from us. So books have become a very important way for us to transmit our languages: they expose the kids to vocabulary and situations that we don’t usually live in reality and they transmit to them part of our cultural background (traditions and characters specific of our respective heritages). All this, in addition to the many benefits we believe literature has in kids: the strong parent-kid bonding created by sharing time reading a book, the exposure to a wider range of grammar and vocabulary, the possibility to use literature as a problem-solving or issue-discussion tool, the abstraction to imaginary worlds where everything is possible…
_PS.JPG) |
| M (15 months) reading with H |
* Mummy I *
The very first thing I bought when I knew I was pregnant were books. I was raised surrounded by them and was an avid reader, specially through childhood and in my teenager years (I must admit, as an adult I read a lot less than I would like to…). So for me reading to my kids was an essential part of the education I wanted to give to them.
When M was born I was a bit lost on what books to get. I started buying random books on-line based on their reviews, with mixed success. Then I started searching the web for people’s recommendations; I found plenty of interesting and useful blogs and articles about kids literature.
I had been a food blogger for over 5 years before becoming a mum (Handsindough). Somehow motherhood took away my willingness to continue blogging about food, it was suddenly not appealing anymore. But “once a blogger, always a blogger”, so this blog is my new adventure: a place to share my family’s experiences about kids literature, hoping that the reviews will be useful to other parents out there looking for good books for their children. And maybe getting in return reviews from other families with good suggestions!
* M *
M was born in February 2012. He has been read to since we got home from hospital.
Despite being a very physically active boy (he seems to strongly believe in “why to walk if I can run or jump”) he rarely refuses to seat down to read a book. Actually, it isn't strange that he is the one asking us to read (quite often before 06:00!).
His taste in books keeps evolving month after month and by now he has a very strong opinion on what he wants to read or not. It isn't strange that we have to read a book 100 times one week and then he refuses to read it at all the week after.
Despite being a very physically active boy (he seems to strongly believe in “why to walk if I can run or jump”) he rarely refuses to seat down to read a book. Actually, it isn't strange that he is the one asking us to read (quite often before 06:00!).
His taste in books keeps evolving month after month and by now he has a very strong opinion on what he wants to read or not. It isn't strange that we have to read a book 100 times one week and then he refuses to read it at all the week after.
_PS.JPG) |
| M (14 months) |
No comments:
Post a Comment