No More Yawns!

By Children Rising | April 4, 2013

This week, I picked two nonfiction books for Erick to read. One was titled Mighty Spiders! and the other, simply, Frogs!

The books did not need their exclamation points to draw Erick’s attention.
“I love spiders!” he said, grabbing the spider book. Inside its pages we learned about different kinds of spiders. Some spiders are large enough to eat birds and frogs. Other spiders live under rocks. Some spiders can make air bubbles to travel underwater. Yet others have bright coloring and horns.
At the end of the book, there were small labeled illustrations of each spider that had made an appearance in the book. Erick pointed to each one, repeating, “I like this one! I like this one! I like this one!” When he pointed to the last one, he closed the book and said, “I love them ALL!”

I don’t have half as much enthusiasm for spiders as Erick does, but I was excited to see him reading some of the harder words, like “creeping” and “catch” and “insects.”

The frog book was similarly engrossing for Erick. Did you know that some frogs are large enough to eat mice and other frogs? Some frogs are also so small that they can sit on the edge of your fingernail. When we turned to a photograph of a frog puffing its throat, Erick cried, “Ew! That’s so sick! Ew! I don’t want to see that!”
“Well, if this book is too gross, we can pick a different one to read,” I responded. I was a little taken aback because I thought the spiders had been much more disgusting.
Erick paused.
“No. I’m going to finish reading it.”
“Well, if you see a picture you don’t like, you can put your hand over it.”
“No. I’m okay.”

And he was.