Blog Introduction

 

"I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage."
                                                                                                                 ~Roald Dahl

 

I chose to create this blog for my college non-fiction writing course because I spent my childhood with a book in my hands, but my youngest sisters would rather watch Netflix. Because of this, I spent the last few summers dragging them to our local library and piling books into their arms in a desperate attempt of making them read. In the process, I rediscovered favorite books from my childhood and discovered new books to add to my growing list of recommendations.

The result of our library trips? My younger sisters started reading, as I finally realized that the universal rule for encouraging kids to read for fun is to cater to their interests. At first, I gave them books I liked, but they didn't enjoy them. So after I gave them a few failed books, I started organizing books into categories for them. My youngest sister used to believe that along with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, unicorns and dragons were real, so I gave her books from the fantasy genre. My other sister loves cats, so I picked out books with mice as the central characters.

Therefore, my purpose for this blog is to share the children's book recommendations that I created during my trial and error period of convincing my siblings to read. My hope is that these recommendations will be useful for either someone else trying to teach a love of reading or someone looking for another good book to read.