Wednesday 25 July 2012

Book club week 2

For my second book I have decided to go with our very recent favourite: "Where the wild things are" by Maurice Sendak.
One of very talented photographers I know through one of photography groups shared photographs of her son in a costume. I have never heard of this book before and seeing the photographs made me want to read it.
Here is the link, please have a look, the photographs are amazing: http://julieanneimages.com/blog/thank-you-mr-sendak/
So, a couple of weeks ago as we were looking through the books at the library, I have spotted it! I was so excited and took the book, thinking it's just for me. Lucy was curious about the book and asked me to read it. To my surprise, she loved it. She asked to keep it a bit longer and we didn't return it with the rest of the books we took out that day, which means a lot. I found the book fascinating, but thought it's one of the children's books that really is mostly for adults. But obviously, the trick is that everybody loves it on different levels.
I am sure it's not the only fantastic book I wasn't aware about, so if you have any great books for children, please feel free to either recommend them in comments or send me an e-mail: tamara@tphotography.co.uk 

Thursday 19 July 2012

Do you enjoy reading your children's books as much as they do?

Introducing a new weekly feature! Something that has been on my mind for a while, and although it's still the work in progress and not perfect, I thought I would start. The biggest part of my identity is being a mum, and I wanted to also share some of the things that are important to me outside the camera :) We love books, books are a big part of our daily routine. So, here is a start of a weekly book feature.

One thing I'm very curious about is how do you choose the books you read to your children?

Some of our books are in Russian, sent to us by my mum, my friends and what I bought during our visits. Some of the books in English were given as gifts and some books I have bought.
But most of the books we read are from the library. We often take out 10-15 books at once. Our local library is in a leisure centre where we have swimming lessons and we always stop by the library after the lesson. Also, our library runs the most fantastic rhyme time and story time so we are visiting it at least a couple of times a week. We browse through the shelves and look for something that looks interesting. We also look for the familiar authors/illustrators and series. I thought I would share with you some of our favourites.

So... Book club week 1 (can anyone help out with a better name for it?)
I want to start off with Emma Chichester Clark's "Melrose and Croc" books. After we extended them in our library numerous amount of times and collected most of them I thought it's about time other children have a chance to read them and bought the books.

Lucy loves the nice stories, Klara just likes the crocodile and the dog and I absolutely adore the illustrations. Emma Chicherster Clark's style is so recongizable, she created this perfect world. - vintage, cute, bright... Reading the books to my girls is a visual feast for me! The stories are short and very kind, about friendship and happy things.

I won't be describing all the individual books, but here is one of them. This book should be very timely right now, seeing it's the middle of "summer" and all (sigh):

Books about Melrose and Croc:
Friends for life
Beside the sea
Find a smile
Go to town
Together at Christmas
A hero's birthday

I have a list of books I would love to share with you, but I also would LOVE to hear from you all - what do you read to your children, how do you find new books, or what are our old favourites, maybe from your own childhood?



 
© Tamara Tovey Photography