Yesterday afternoon my daughter came running upstairs to my office, bursting with excitement, holding a picture book. "Mommy! Mommy! I readed this BY MYSELF!" she announced. "This" was the picture book Little Humans, by Brandon Stanton, a gift that we had received a while back from my sister. Then she opened the book to a page at random to show me that she could indeed read it. She was very, very proud, and almost immediately ran off to share her news with my husband.
Little Humans is not a very text-dense picture book - it's more of a photo essay with little captions. For example, one page shows a boy with his bike on the ground. The text says: "Sure, sometimes they fall." Then the next page says: "But they get back up." But it's also not a book that we've read so many times that my daughter knows it by heart. (She also "reads" The Princess in Black, but there is a lot of memorization going on there.) I think that Little Humans is just a book that was unintimidating enough for her to give it a try.
My daughter has so far shown more interest in writing than in reading - she's mostly happy to let us do the reading, but she'll sit down and write her own lists and stories. I think that the feeling of accomplishment from having read Little Humans will inch her forward a bit, though, and that she'll be reading more before we know it. Of course there's no rush. I just want to keep seeing the excitement that she showed last night.
Do you remember your child's first (non-memorized) picture book? Thanks for reading!
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