Books for the Little One II

For the past few nights, bedtime stories have revolved primarily around these 2 books - 棕色的熊，棕色的熊，你在看什么？and 鳄鱼不刷牙. P will still pick up other books, but these 2 are a must to read to her before she sleeps.

棕色的熊，棕色的熊，你在看什么？is a translated version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? As mentioned in this post, I was lucky to be able to win a voucher and got the starter pack which contains this book. For the first few weeks, this book was carefully kept in my wardrobe and not introduced to P, all because she was still very violent with books. Dog ears, tears, folds... we've seen them all. As a result, I was only buying board books for her at one point in time. Recently, I mustered the courage to leave the book out and she took to it straight away. The good thing about this book is that it contains both the English and Chinese words, so you could read either. I would read the Chinese version to P, while hubby reads the English version. She will get exposure to both languages in that way.

棕色的熊，棕色的熊，你在看什么？ from Flip for Joy

The story starts out asking the brown bear what he saw, and progressed to asking various colored animals (red bird, yellow duck, blue horse, purple cat etc) what they saw. It was useful to help them toddlers learn about colors and animals at the same time. The story ended off with a teacher asking a group of children what they saw, and the children repeated all the colored animals. The only gripe I have is I find the Chinese translation quite a mouthful, not as smooth as reading the English version. Apart from that, this book is great and P loves it. She's constantly anxious to flip the page and find out which animal is next, almost tearing the pages on some occasions.

The next book that P loves is my 2nd purchase from Flip for Joy. After P's first dental visit, I've been furiously searching the web for books related to dental health. I went onto Flip for Joy's website, typed in 'teeth' into the search box, and tadahhhhh, this book appeared as one of the results. It was affordable too, so I barely gave a thought before clicking on the 'Add to Cart' and 'Checkout' buttons. When the book arrived and I flipped through, I have to admit I was quite disappointed that the 'dental health' was only 2 pages. However, the rest of the book talks about other good habits and hygiene practices, like 'lions don't brush their hair, but I do', 'pigs don't wash their faces, but I do'. Within 2 days of reading this book to P, she was able to show me how to brush hair (actually she will just ruffle her hair), how to wash face (more like rubbing her face). Best of all, the story ended with 'owls don't sleep at night, but we (a group of children) do'. That's when P will quickly lie down on her pillow and pretend to go to sleep. Now whenever P picks up this book and pass it to me, she would put her index finger near her mouth and mimic the brushing teeth action. Oh, I have to add that this book also comes with both English and Chinese words (reiterate the exposure to 2 languages).

鳄鱼不刷牙 from Flip for Joy

It's really amazing how much (and fast) children can learn from books. As I end off this post, a set of dental health related books are on the way to me. You can expect Dora and Spongebob in the next series of Books for the Little One.