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Using self made books. You can start out from the beginning teaching a child the correct
way to handle a book which is very important if you want your real books that you paid
for to last much longer down the road. Tell them that the seam or the cover always goes
to the left and you can teach them their left and right hands at the same time so that they
don't take the book and start it from the back which is very natural and they would
even put it upside down if it wasn't for the fact that the picture would be upside down.
So teach them how to hold a book, teach them to always ready the title and the author and
the illustrator. Sometimes I would put written by me or by my name and then illustrated by
me and illustrated is a hard word, they'll just say that's illustrated, just say illustrated.
So they read the title, they read who it's by, they read the illustrator. Then they open
the first page and you can teach them about dedication pages and copyright and all that
stuff down the road. But our books start here and they start reading. Teach them never to
fold a book backwards like that because it breaks the binding. Teach them anything else
you can think of to treat books correctly. Books are very important, books are to be
treasured, teach them to love books from the beginning. And they start reading. Tracking,
teach them to take their finger, put it underneath each word as they read it, that will help
for a long time. It's kind of like training wheels, they don't do it forever but it helps
in the beginning. A cat sat. And they will say a c-a-t, cat and if they couldn't get
it, you will have them cover all but the first word and you treat this word as individual,
tell them not to look at anything else until they've mastered that word. When they get
it, have them start over and read from the beginning; a cat sat. Once they work that
out, have them read the whole thing. A cat sat. Tada, look at the picture. As I'm making
these books I try not to make the picture too obvious that they can just guess by looking
at the pictures. Sometimes I'll put more things in the picture like another dog, or a rat
or something so that they can't automatically guess what it is. The picture is the delight
after they finish reading the correct sentence, to tell them yes, I read it correctly and
look at that cool little cat that mommy or daddy or something drew. That looks very funny,
maybe I could do a better job in a year, but in any case, that's how it works and there
we have using self made books. Again, once again, keep them on a shelf, keep them in
the same place all the time, teach your children to treasure books.