Books are forever treasures that cannot replace all the iPads, tablets, smartphones, and phablets loaded with all the wonderful, colorful, educational apps. Books may be passed on to many generations and never needs charging 😉

What Books Can Do

With all the ever improving technology to aid in learning, let’s not forget that books help in exercising more the creativity of our toddlers. They will be aided with illustrations but they will give life to these illustrations through their imagination.

Reading with your children is also a way to bond with them. Books can widen your child’s vocabulary in many ways, make him/ her more attentive with longer attention span which will eventually be important for concentration, and will improve their listening skills. These I am already observing with my almost a year old baby and she loves to look at books now.

Even adults can always benefit from reading books. It can constantly widen and improve their vocabularies, stimulate creativity and imagination, and for added information.

Technology and Kids

I am not saying that technology is not good for kids. My child is also into watching television and watching on my phone or tablet when in the car. She needs it to be calm most of the time since she seems to hate the idea of being tied up on her car seat (and never got used to it).

Technology is another useful tool to aid in the learning process and help our lives become easier. That’s why as early as less than a year, babies know how to mimic their parents and elders on how they use touchscreens and mobile phones. We have a very intelligent generation of children today! Everything is so advanced and information is readily available.

Let us, as much as we can, avoid making technology the always the babysitter of our children. Let’s make reading fun for kids and shouldn’t be treated as a chore that they need to do. It should be a happy habbit for them as they grow up. Let’s us not be enslaved by technology.

I’m excited to see how much more benefits there are from reading to my children. It’s one thing I can teach them that some people take for granted today. We see bookstores getting smaller and are frequented by mostly older people. More amd more books are sold as e-books- means less printing cost but the physical experiences of reading are forgotten as well. Turning pages and bookmarking the last part you read with a bookmark you made are some things I’d like my kids to experience too and eventually pass it on to their children’s children.

I have a vision to make the generation today read more again and find physical books very valuable and important. Of course, I will start this vision and mission in our home with my kids.

Sharing the current favorites of my almost a year old baby which I highly recommend to those who have toddlers.

She loves it when we read them to her and she later points at the images on her own and tries to narrate like us. :

What Color ? : A book about basic colors. It’s a tear-proof and semi- waterproof book for toddlers. It can repell little liquid splashes and just simply wipe them off. It’s very colorful and has detachable rubber colored puzzle pieces for every color featured. Very easy to learn for toddlers. My baby learned how to turn each page and remove the detachable pieces on her own. Got ours fron National Bookstore (Greenbelt 1 branch).

The Beginners Bible for Toddlers: Children’s Bible version. I’ve been looking for a good tear-proof book on Bible stories for quite some time until we found this in Fully Booked (Powerplant branch). My baby loves the illustrations for now and we tell her the stories over and over again. Eventually, she’ll read the sentences on her own and learn the stories of the Bible too. Wordings of the book are perfect for early readers and will be easily understood by kids. You can also simply wipe stains and dirt from the book. A really good book to get for your toddlers.

Pop-Up Story Books: These were given as gifts from my baby’s godmother for Christmas. She enjoys it now because of it’s nice illustrations and colorful pages and of course, the idea of pop-up characters. Amazingly, she doesn’t tear off the pop-up characters/ elements of the books even if she’s at the stage of tearing everything into pieces. When she tries to tear it off, she looks at us and we tell her with a different tone (not a cheerful one) not to tear it and take care of it instead. She then listens and turns the page. Good girl! I hope it’s not just now 😉 I love how I can use them to set rules and discipline her in a way. These can be purchased from Toy Kingdom toy stores nationwide.

There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.

-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Enjoy reading and bonding with your toddlers and children ! Time is too precious so start now 😊

~Tina~