When Mother was pregnant with YQ, I found her Chinese pregnancy books and read them over and over again.
My English was kind of non-existent. When I was about five, I followed my grandma to her work place - think she was a cleaner at some office. The boss's daughter was there as well. I remember that incident - there were just two of us in a meeting two. She was dressed very nicely. We were about the same age but she was reading Wizard of Oz while I didn't know what "shoe" meant when Yan asked me on a separate occasion. (But my memory is obviously very good, haha!)
I guess that somewhat spurred me to want to learn English. But by P1, my English still couldn't make it - I didn't understand the teacher but my classmates were starting to open their workbook *.*
Finally, when I was eight, I went to the library for the first time. I remember randomly picking a couple of books and I had difficulty with the protagonist's name of this English book. For the rest of my primary school years, we went to the library every three Saturdays, maxing out the borrowing limit on five cards, i.e. 20 books in total. I didn't like it when YQ borrowed this baby monkey book again and again *.*
Btw, back then, there were long queues to return and borrow books, with the librarian scanning each book with a pen and stamping the due dates. Back home, we used random pens or sticks to pretend to be librarians :p
So I started reading at eight. Mostly fiction. The only non-fiction I remember was about space and astronomy, and brain teasers. Borrowed fewer but thicker books of mystery, crime and romance as I entered secondary school, primarily coz no time. JC was full of Louis Cha. University was when I started on fantasy though second year was almost devoted to Dream of the Red Chamber.
My early working life was spent bawling my eyes out with 张小娴 and re-acquainting myself with authors I read in the previous 10 years. I forgot about books for quite a while coz I was busy with work. Except for Harry Potter whenever they came out. Then I started reading a mixed bag in Evanston. Then it was kiddy books. I found reading apps and read 琼瑶 for the first time while nursing Yu. There was lots of Overdrive around that time too. More recently, I have been reading online novels - just finished the very long 庆余年...
Now for the kids.
I bought kiddy books when I was pregnant with Kai. I was staying in the east when I first came back from Evanston and there was some book fair at Expo. I tried to start them reading early, from infanthood.
Today, Yu is quite happy to read with me. Yang would pull the longest books for me to read. But since his toddler years, Kai has not shown much interest in books until a couple of weeks ago.
I think he was saying he wished he had Captain Underpants. He was so surprised and happy when I told him to find one at our bookshelf. We bought that a couple of years ago coz we thought he was interested - he mentioned that back in K1.
He read bits of it here and there, and finished it this morning. I think he picked up momentum along the way. That is also the first book of such length that he has completed :)
So today, after his play date, we went to Popular to get him a new one. I think he was trying to avoid the thicker ones *.* But eventually, he decided on one.
Repeat this photo of him browsing for Captain Underpants
A few more weeks ago, I also started getting him to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for 10-15 min every evening. He went from resistant to just picking up from where he started. Didn't realise that just that short bit of time each day could be so effective. And when Captain Underpants came around, he didn't need the points as motivation.
I really hope Captain Underpants can lead him into the wonderful world of reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment