We do have a little celebration for some achievement in life. How I wish I can issue a certificate or something to really congratulate small things that Miza had achieved in life. This is not something academic or even outstanding, but it is something worth doing in life that I am sure will help so much in her life experience.
Reading has never been my forte, I am bad at it, even until today. I don't enjoy reading in regular basis. It is different from my husband who reads books regularly, therefore his vocabularies is just amazing. I am sure reading helps many things in life including school performance. Composition and reading comprehension should go along with it too. Therefore I am so happy, delighted and pleased to see Miza has moved toward reading thick book. Books that consist more than 24 chapters or even 400+ pages.
She has grown up so much on her reading. She started out with the Robin, Let's Read More Series, the small reading books that are being sold in Popular book store, when she was 6 years old by herself. Popular sells the book in series level by level. It starts out from level 1 all the way to level 5. The stories are quite interesting for young children, they are folk tales, legend or even travel experience. The books are colorfull and have many cute pictures inside. Young children will enjoy these books so much. We had collected these books, we bought almost all of the books from the series. Miza still keeps them on her book shelf, she is very proud of her books collections. Sometimes she comes back and read few of the books from this series. She reads these books by herself all the way until the begining year of her primary1, click HERE if you want to see sample of the books.
From Robin Series, she then continued her love of reading by picking up the Geronimo Stilton Books. She is not into Enid Blython or Roald Dahl. I give her freedom on choosing her own books to read, I don't want to press her on this. I want the love of reading comes naturally from within herself.
She loves Geronimo Stilton because the books are full of chalenging adventures. She loves story with adventures and mission with a lot of history background or legend. She enjoys greek mythology, folk tales and legend from around the world. Since she was very young, I used to read for her these books selection before bed time. We also do spend times in the library regularly. She goes to her art class and piano class in WhiteSand, we usually spend time at the library for one or two hours before going home after class. When we are at the library she will just randomly pick up books, usually there will be 5 or 10 of them. They are light books and easy reading, like comics or reference books for example. She will then just read them all within that one or two hour. We continue this habit until today and we both enjoy it so much.
I see her reading pick up tremendously when she is in her Primary 2 year. Her form teacher, Mrs. Chin, loves to talk about good books in class. She even lets the girls read her son's books. She brings the books to school and lets the girls borrow the books from her. I see different types of books there, when Miza brings the books home. Mrs Chin has many good books that emphasize on values in life. The books are very random, they are from different type of books series nothing specific. I can imagine her son, he must love reading, there are so many books she has shared with the girls in the class. Miza seizes this opportunity so well, she then moves over from Geronimo Stilton to these books. Some of them are on series, like Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. She also build her own reading collection from the book series of Mallory Mc Donald & The Fairies Promise by Kathleen Duey and off course few other. These are books without pictures, mostly are words around 120 to 200 pages. I am very happy with her improvement, you click here to see the books that Miza had read, this is her goodread account. I keep updating the books that she had read in her entire life, some of them I forgot to do. I guess this can be a good list for her to read back when she grows up one day.
Moving forward, since the past few weeks, Miza had moved toward a thick, big serious book. She started out by reading the teenage books that I read. They are still under children books category, but the story is just amazing. It is very typical of Miza, she always wants to know what I am doing, reading, imagining, dreaming ... all sort about me and what I am doing in life. Therefore I use this to my advantage, I then role model to her by start reading serioud children books. I picked up these teenage books hoping Miza will be inspired to start reading them as well. I had tried for few months and finally it is accomplished. She picked up book that I read and she continues and moves on to it by herself. Can you imagine how happy I am ....
Yes this is nothing extraordinary, but this is Miza's achievement, her milestone in her life experience in reading. Congratulations Miza, you had moved to the new level of Reading .... Let's have a good celebration. Yes!
