Your favorite 100 books or Arantxa's summer reading.

Decidí mejor hacer este en inglés únicamente, incluyendo solo explicaciones relevantes en español.

N.B. Since I have been mainly writing about Lorena, this one will be devoted to Arantxa.

When I was a senior in high school (=6to de prepa), my friends and I found a "vocational orientation book" in the school's library. By the way, this was SO cool, the library was actually close to the classrooms and you could actually go there, which was not the case when we were sophomores and juniors, in the other campus (en 4to y 5to la biblioteca era prácticamente inaccesible). Anyway, this book had a series of quizzes to help you choose a "career". Oh, since I am already rambling on cultural differences, this one is definitely note-worthy. In Mexico, you don't major in anything; you choose a career: you come out of university a lawyer, a doctor, a mathematician, philospher, accountant, etc. There is no pre-med or law school. Granted, becoming a doctor takes longer than anything else; but that is not the case for lawyers since they start taking all the relevant classes from the beginning.

OK, back to our book. One of the questions was to "LIST YOUR FAVORITE 100 BOOKS". My close friends and I chuckled at the concept. We joked that probably if you combined all the books read by each student in a classroom, you probably would not get to 100; and we were talking about lifetime reading. Mexico is definitely not a country of readers. Some people might feel that I should not be saying this, but it gives you some context.

I still think that the question is a hard one. Can you list your favorite 100 books? I might be able to do 50, and I can now add a dozen or so great children/picture books. I mean, I have read and liked many books, but how would I determine the best 100, I have no idea.

So, what does all of this have to do with Arantxa? Arantxa is an avid reader. She began reading last March, at age 4 and 2 months; and became really independent and fluent after a summer hiatus. Then, it all moved really fast, and she's been reading at a high level (at least 4th grade for several months). Of course, the more she reads, the better she gets, the easier it is.

Summer is meant for outside play, swimming in the lake, BBQs, etc; but it is also about reading. The King county library had the challenge of reading/being read 1000 minutes. She was done with those by mid-July. Barnes and Noble offered a free book for kids who had read 8 books. She got her free book (chose Frindle, by Andrew Clements http://frindle.com/) and quickly read that. Here you can read a page http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0689818769/ref=sib_dp_pop_sup?ie=UTF8&p=random#reader-link

Her new school also has a reading summer program. Kids get their names on a postcard and a small prize if they read 12 books (every 100 pages count as one book for books over 200 pages long). So, I decided to get her reading log started. I thought of asking her to write at least a word from each title, but soon I realized that it would be too much. After all, she hasn't even started school yet. If we had done if from the beginning, we could have managed. I still have asked her to write some.

So, I start typing a spreadsheet and I am SHOCKED! We still have to walk around the house to see if we can remember what she has read, but so far, the list has 105 books!!!!

Some of those are simple picture books, a good chunk of them are from the Disney Wonderful world of Reading (about 45 pages, 1 to 5 paragraphs per page). But there are MANY, MANY early chapter books. She has read a ton of the Rainbow Fairy books since being introuced to them early August. She has also read several Disney Fairy books which contain decent language (not overly simplified), and are over 100 pages long. In addition, she has read other "regular" chapter books.

My guess is that this summer, and perhaps the next one, will be the ones in which she reads most books. I assume that later she'll naturally choose longer books. For now, she has loved reading new books, and re-reading her favorite chapter books like My Father's Dragon and all of those fairy books.

The list doesn't include the 5 or so she's read today. She was so happy when Lorena was taking a nap, and she said "Woo hoo! I read a full Disney fairy book, without interruption!".

I really don't need to do the list, but I think it will be fun for her to "read" when she is older, the books she devoured the summer before starting school.

This past couple of weeks, we've gotten to the point of wondering when it gets to the point of "too much reading". For now, she continues to play a lot and she is even managing to learn to ride her bike w/o training wheels and to swim. Aren't I the proud mom?

So, now, and just for fun, a couple of questions for my readers. When did you read the most? and what are your 100 favorite books? Well, you can at least mention a few ;).