Amanda's Book Nook: Volume 5: Respect for Books

Volume 5: Respect for Books

One of the first “rules of the house” that my daughter learned (at a very young age, I might add) is that we respect books! The primary form of this rule was that we do not put books in our mouth. I know that babies like to put just about anything in their mouths, but why do they like to eat books so much? It is paper, folks, it cannot taste that good, nor does it feel anywhere near as good as a toy! But, for some strange reason, babies like to mouth books.

As a Kindergarten teacher, this was one of my pet peeves, a lack of respect for books. Believe it or not, there were children, even at the age of four, five and six, that were “eating” books accompanied with ripping books, writing in books and throwing books. It is our job as parents, our child’s first teacher, to teach them how to treat a book.

Because of my strong beliefs, and the number of books that I had to repair in my classroom, I consistently enforced the “We don’t eat books, we read books” rule with my daughter until it stuck. It didn’t take too long either, I suppose because she was constantly trying and I consistently followed up with the same phrase.

Here are some more “rules” that we can teach our children about books:

1)We read books, we don’t eat them.

2)We turn pages carefully.

3)We always have clean hands when reading a book.

4)We close a book when we are finished reading it.

5)We put a book back where it belongs when we are finished reading it.

Books are expensive and they are important and we should try to teach our children how to respect them.