Literacy Milestone: Reading Her First Elephant and Piggie Book Aloud

The other night I was downstairs while my husband put our daughter to bed. I heard her intermittently yelling, but couldn't tell what she was saying. I finally went up to see what was going on. I found them snuggled together, with my daughter reading aloud from We Are in a Book! by Mo Willems. When I asked about the noise she said: "Well, there's a lot of yelling in the book." What could I say to that? I stayed to listen for a while, and sure enough, she was reading aloud to Daddy about Elephant and Piggie being in a book.

Now, there may have been a bit of memorization going on, because my husband told me later that he had read it aloud to her first. At the end of the book, Gerald asks: "Hello. Will you please read us again?" My husband didn't want to read the same book again, and told her that if she wanted to read it again, she would have to read it herself. So she did. It's not a case where we've read this book aloud to her 50 times, though. We do read the books from this series aloud from time to time, but I've kind of had in mind to save them for her to read them herself, so I've tried not to wear them out.

This is incidentally an example of a "meta" book working to engage kids. Gerald asked her to read the book again, and this made her want to do so. I will also add that having your child read Elephant and Piggie books aloud right before bed is not the best choice, in terms of inducing sleepiness. My daughter got so into the book (hence the yelling) that it took her a while to calm down and go to sleep. But for earlier in the day? Perfection!

There's a reason that books from this series have won various Cybils and Geisel Award mentions over the years. [This title won the Cybils Award in 2010, for example.] I'm going to be very sorry when there are no more new Elephant and Piggie books (alas, soon!). But I'm glad that my daughter still has most of the titles ahead of her to read aloud for the first time. 

© 2016 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage or at my Growing Bookworms page on Facebook.