My son has always loved books. We have tried to encourage this from a very early age by having books be equal to toys. We have books that work as toys in the bath tub (these are great!), books in his bedroom toy shelf, books in the play space of the living room, and even books in the car.
BUT…I noticed a few weeks ago that he just stopped gravitating towards the books. This is what his reading area (in the living room) looked like. I thought the set-up was cute, but I think it was too cluttered for him, and he couldn’t pull out the books very easily.
“Maybe there are too many books”, I thought. So I tried an experiment. I had seen a really cute Pinterest post on Montessori Themes that had a few books based on a theme, for the children to explore. Then, those themes were rotated each week. So, instead of having a big variety of books, I divided the books into themes and put out just 1 theme (with only 4 books). Here were some of the divisions:
And they were a hit!
My son, gravitated to the reading area (unprompted) when he woke up from his nap. *Because of course I was only able to do this during nap time.:)
So, I totally encourage you to try this out. I am storing the themes that are not in use in a basket on our book shelf.
We now rotate “themes” every 1-2 weeks and it’s working awesome to keep my 1-year-old interested in books!
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