Today, May 5th, we celebrate the annual boys' festival (traditionally it was, but lately it's known as the children's day) in Japan. In short, it’s a day to appreciate and pray for your little one’s sound growth and happiness to come.
This morning, I made these origami kabuto (helmet for Japanese warriors) , irises, and carp, to celebrate our son's first festival of the Japanese tradition. They are iconic items for this day in my homeland.
It’s incredible how every single day makes a difference to a baby. Say, how much he speaks and squeaks now compared to just a week ago. I don’t remember exactly since when, but it’s been at least for a couple of weeks that my son started babbling something almost sounds like words. Da da, aba ba, ubbbb, cha, ta… It's irresistibly cute.
His “vocabulary” increases each week, in proportion to the variation of his body movements. By the time he turned four months old, he’d already learned how to turn his body to his left (always left, can’t do the same to his right yet) and to keep his head up.
One month passed, and now in this position he puts his head up and down so frequently that it looks like he is doing push-ups. He moves so tremendously that we can’t take our eyes off him to prevent accidents.
He also started to show preferences for certain toys. His favourites at the moment are a colourful wooden rattle and sensory books passed from his cousins.
Sensory books...I didn’t know until recently that how these certain books were properly called: they are books to touch (or listen to), rather than to read. My son clutches, squashes, and keeps them in his mouth, and within a few seconds gets himself entangled.
A bit advanced sensory book can be like this one. It has simple narratives that teach opposite concepts: inside and outside. Each page has some holes to peek in the next page and in the back.
It's no doubt babies love books that have dents and bumps. My son’s fellow zero-year-old friends are crazy for this kind of books that we gave for the last Christmas. Last weekend, I saw one of them nicely ragged while she actively "reads" it on the lunch table.
Other sensory books may have batteries inside to play sounds and music, but I don’t really like them. There is nothing wrong with them, so no offence, if you got one. It’s just a matter of personal taste.
Anyway, not a few parents, including myself, may hesitate over which books to read to their new-borns and zero-year-olds. I usually go by my own intuition, or by word‐of‐mouth. But it also won’t hurt to consult some experts’ opinion.
For example, you are quite lucky if your city has the Bookstart. It’s a national book gifting programme born in the U.K. in 1992 by a charity organization BookTrust, then spread to other countries.
How it operates can depend on each Bookstart, but fundamentally it works like this: the programme offers free books to all children living in the municipality starting from the new-born stage until they enter the pre-school. Parents also receive recommended book lists with tips for continuing their home reading activity.
This great programme was initiated based on a premise that having an early introduction to books and being read to every day would benefit children educationally, culturally, socially and emotionally.
In Italy, where I currently live, there is a similar practice inspired by such objectives started in 2001 as Leggere per Crescere (Read to Grow). It doesn’t distribute free books but offers parental guidance through reading and encourages knowledge and experience sharing among parents, educators, paediatricians, pharmacists about reading aloud to children from zero to six years old, including those in need for special care.
Some parents may don’t even have an idea of reading books to zero-year-olds who still don’t understand a word, but I believe the aim of reading books to babies isn’t oriented to teaching words and concepts of something, but rather to sharing time together and to having physical contact.
I love reading my favourite children’s books with beautiful illustrations while holding him on my lap. And I know that he loves cuddling and listening to my voice, as I wrote in my previous posts.
That being said, I admit we have few books for his age at home. Now my favourite children’s library in Bologna, Salaborsa Ragazzi has reopened, I can't wait to go back there to discover more books for babies.
Perhaps I talked little about “book of the day” today, but I hope I could share with you some of my thoughts on reading books to zero-year-olds, or how to discover books that may suit them.
Dentro e fuori
Written and Illustrated by Gabriele Clim
Published in July 2015 by La Coccinel