How do you choose a book?

My daughter and I went to the library this morning … not because we did not have any books to read since her bookcase is overflowing and we have all the books on Big Universe too! We actually went just because I felt like we needed to get out of the house and do something …

I was expecting it to take awhile for my daughter to choose books to checkout from the library. I know that when I go to select a book … whether in a story, in a library, or online here are Big Universe, it takes me some times since I like to look through the options, consider the possibilities, and even read some to decide if I think I will like what I am choosing.

Just let me say, that is not the case for my daughter (or for most children really).

My daughter just finished Kindergarten, so when she was looking for books today, here are the things she considered:

• the look of the cover
• if she could read some of the words on the first few pages
• she did look through the book, since that is what she said they told her to do at school, but mainly at the illustrations

Before we went to choose books, I had said she could pick three for us to get today. We ended up getting six …

Her class went to visit the public library a few weeks ago, so she told me where the Easy Reader books were so we could get one of those. She picked the one with an orange book spine (orange is her favorite color this week). She did point out to me that the book has illustrations but there are no colors in them (and that she can’t color them either).

Instead of making her put back the books I did not think were right for her to get today, I decided to let her choose and did not make any comment. I did listen to how she chose books though …

I think teachers and parents can learn a lot about their children and their reading based on how they select books. So I have a challenge for you …

Let your child or students pick some books to read here on Big Universe and see how the books are chosen …

What prompts them to chose the ones that get chosen?

What does that tell you?

After the book is read, it would interesting to see if the child would choose that book again or recommend it to someone else …

 

(There are times when choosing a book based on the title and/or the illustrations can be interesting … See this past blog post about a book named Patch)