My two little bookworms

Both of my babies were very different when it came to books. Harry was looking at the pictures in books almost from day one, he particularly loved the books with the black and white pictures and would gaze at them for a few minutes. By the time he was three months old I was reading him The Gruffalo and he was paying rapt attention. It took Mia a lot longer to develop an interest in books. She wouldn't sit still for a minute when I tried to read to her, and she was more interested in pulling at the pages and wriggling to get away.

It wasn't until she was about three years old that she would sit still for a story at bedtime, and she quickly found the favourites that she wanted over and over every night. She had quite a slow start to learning to read herself, but in the last few months her reading has really come on, and although at school she's working her way through Biff, Chip and Kipper at home she's started picking up and reading more complicated chapter books. She can't read every word, and she skips the ones that she doesn't know (she gets very cross if I try to help her so I leave her to it!) but she seems to pick up enough to make sense of the story and to keep her interested.

Harry has been able to read longer chapter books for a while now, but he's always preferred his non fiction books. He has some fantastic factual books and he loves going through them and calling out to me to tell me an interesting fact that he's picked up. I had recently been struggling to get him to read fiction books, so I was delighted a couple of months back when he picked up the first Harry Potter book, and now he's almost on book seven. I wouldn't say that he's named after Harry Potter, but I probably wouldn't have thought of the name Harry if I hadn't discovered the books, so it's nice to see him reading and enjoying them. He received a lovely box set of the Chronicles of Narnia books for his birthday, so he's decided that he's going to go onto those next.

I'm so glad that my children are turning into readers, I'm looking forward to sharing all my old favourite books with them as they grow up!