Saturday, July 12, 2008

Family Reading Challenge: My Week, This Week's Winner, and New Giveaway!

Wow! Eighteen of you signed up for the Family Reading Challenge and made a commitment to read more during the busy days of summer! Thanks to all of you!

It's funny how you always seem to find time to do things once you tell yourself you're going to do it, and my husband and I made sure we would find time to read to our daughter every day this week. On most nights, we used reading to wind her down after bath time. Other nights we read to her after dinner. She was being extremely independent this week and wanted to not only pick the books, but hold them, AND flip the pages. She seemed to gravitate toward Grace Lin's Bringing in the New Year this week and spent a good amount of time just looking at and touching the colorful end papers.

When we finally got her to bed, I spent some time reading, but I didn't have a lot of luck with finding good books to read this week. I abandoned three before I finally found a winner on Wednesday: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See. I finished it last night, and hooboy, this story will stay with me for a while: the torture of foot binding, the bond of a friendship over a lifetime, the plight of women in 19th century China, war, survival, forgiveness...this book has it all.

All in all, it was a great week, and I'm lining up books to read this week. Maybe I'll have some time this afternoon when my little one takes a nap.

Now for this week's winner...Using Random.org, Sweetsue is the winner of four books! Woot Woot! Sweetsue committed to reading an extra book with her granddaughter each time she visits with her. Congratulations! Sweetsue, please send your mailing address to thewellreadchild AT gmail DOT com, and I'll get the books out to you this week.

If you didn't win this week, no worries! Because this week, you have a chance to win 10 paperback books from the Smithsonian Backyard Series. (read my review here) Here's what's up for grabs:



Here's how to enter:
  • If you joined the challenge last week, leave a comment telling me how it's going so far, OR if you have a blog and posted about it there, leave me your link
  • If you're new to the challenge and want to sign up, read more about the challenge here, and come back to this post to sign up in the comments field
Easy peasy, right?

Okay, so I'm looking forward to hearing how your week went!




7 comments:

  1. What a great idea. Somehow I missed the sign up for this last week so I am signing up now.

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  2. All right, I won! I actually hit a twenty family garage sale this a.m. and got 13 childrens books to read to my grandaughter.I spent less than four dollars! I will be babysitting her tomorrow so we will have fun reading.

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  3. Wow! This is a great idea.
    Kicker and I have been going to the library every week and filling up a canvas bag full of library books to check out. Then I read to him each day (and read some for me - ahh, murder mysteries, the perfect summer read!), and it's back to the library the next week!

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  4. Wonderful giveaway!

    I am signing up for the challenge! We could all use more reading in our lives, I think. I'd like to start reading more non-picturey books to my 3 1/2 year old here and there....maybe I'll start with some A.A. Milne and see how it goes. Pooh is always a hit, right?

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  5. What a great idea!

    We're signing up for the challenge. My kids love to be read to, and we'll work more of it in. Mama laso needs to find more time to read - I used to go through 10-20 books a month, I'm lucky to get through one these days!

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  6. Wow, great blog, great idea, great motivation!
    I'm signing up for the challenge now. Yay!

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  7. I just started reading your blog. I am a children's librarian, so I read a ton of board books, Easy picture books, easy readers and juvenile books. I have a 2 year old, James (we call him Jamie) and I am going to join your challenge and read some more to him. We read at least one or two books a night.

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