My daughter is growing to be such a bookworm. Last November, she finished the remaining books (I think 3 of them) of the Harry Potter series. She wanted to read the last book The Cursed Child but I haven't read it so I'm not sure if it's suitable for her age. She even looked up in Google what the age rating is for the book and insisted that she's not like any other 7-year-olds and says she can take more serious topics. Well, I can't explain some topics to her just yet. Not without reading the entire book completely a couple of times. So I won this argument. LOL.
Come December, she bought Roald Dahl's books - I know Matilda, James and the Gian Peach, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And yet again, she finished the set in a span of 2-3 weeks. She could have finished it a lot quicker if I wasn't giving her other activities. On the last week of December, I ordered the William Joyce's The Guardians series. It has 5 paperback books and was only in stock in Fully Booked Cebu. The order arrived January 9th and now, she's on the last book already.
I love that she loves reading. Like what I always tell her godmother, this is the kind of problem that I like. Running out of books that she can read. But still, at this rate, before January ends, I'm going to have to buy a new bookcase just so I can accommodate the books that she wants to buy. (She already has a lineup of the next books she wants to read.) Her father provided her with a tablet where we can just download ebooks for her to read. But then she's doing her arts in the tablet already, if she reads in her tablet too, that's going to be too much time with the device.
I know I need to slow her down even just a notch. We've come to the point where we need to check how many books she's bringing in her bag when we go out. To still satisfy her hunger for reading, I decided to make a Reading Journal for her. This way, she gets to pause for a bit, reflect on the story she read, gather her thoughts and write down things she wants to remember about the story she read. The reading journal was originally intended for her study books. We have tons of books that we have completed since last year and it would strengthen her memory keeping if she writes down about it. I just did not push through with it yet because it would involve a lot of writing. But drastic measures needed to be done with our current dilemma. It seemed to work perfectly fine so far.
My daughter helped me in brainstorming for the content of her reading Journal. The initial one only included just a few details about the book. Her first reaction was that I did not put a field for the illustrator. She feels it is also important to feature the person who drew the pictures in the book because she loves looking at those. It gives her ideas on how to draw things on her own books as well. When she first filled out the version 1 of the Reading Journal, she felt a bit too overwhelmed because the idea was a bit too broad. This only supports the passage I read from Home Education about giving children specific instructions that cannot be subject to vague interpretation. And it makes sense. If we want children to obey us, they need to understand exactly what it is that we need for them to do. And so, I employed her help in coming up with the finalized version of her Reading Journal.
The one on the left was the version 1.0. I printed out another version with more fields to fill out but we ended up with the final final final version. The one on the right. I feel like she was able to express herself even more in this version. These are her first two entries on her reading journal. I can feel that she is not yet 100% onboard with journaling her freereading books by the way she filled out the fields. But as we talked about it, she seemed to see it at a different light. For tomorrow's journal entry, she already has a few ideas on what to write down.
At first, the original function of her Reading Journal is to slow down her reading roll. Now that I'm writing this down, it feels like a terrible thing to do. Who would want to slow down a voracious reader? I just want to moderate her reading appetite. Not that she's reading rubbish, but too much of something is rarely good. Now that she's already making her journal entries, I feel that this will help her keep the memory of her favorite kiddie books. I know I've read a lot of books before and there are some that I need to jog my memory a bit so that I can remember the plot. This reading journal will be that thing that will jog her memory when she's all grown up. I know this will put a smile on her face and will make her remember all the good things during her childhood.