Things You'll Need:
- Bookshelves
- Books
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Step 1
Start small. Find a little bookshelf at a garage sale or in a ready-to-assemble kit. Paint it to go with the nursery and put any books received at baby showers on one shelf. Use the others to store blankets, display stuffed bears or other shower gifts. As your child receives books, the shelves will fill. The important idea is that your child will remember that there were always books present in her life. Share the books and read them often, even if your child is very young and if you read each book a million times. She will not tire of hearing it and you'll have a challenge to find a new way to make it exciting each time you read the book.
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Step 2
Enroll your child in a public library reading program as soon as he's old enough. Go to the library and browse with him. These experiences will guide you in choosing books to add to your child's library--and to suggest to family members for birthday and holiday gifts.
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Step 3
When your child begins to read, give her a children's dictionary and show her how to look things up. It is unimportant that she won't learn to use a dictionary until the next grade in school--she's curious about words now, as she learns to recognize them. Buy new dictionaries as her skills grow. As she gets older, add a thesaurus and a good atlas to her reference collection so she learns that you don't need an Internet connection to browse or look up basic information about your world. When she's fifty, she'll have several good reference books and dictionaries, one or two of which she can use to help her grandchildren learn about the world she grew up in and the language they speak.
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Step 4
Give your favorite books to your children. I still have copies of "The Wind in the Willows" and all four A.A. Milne books, given to me by my mother and a copy of "The Little Lame Prince", a gift to my father in 1934. They sit prominently between theology and law books belonging to great grandparents, in a place where I can reach for them to read to little people who visit us. I have given my own children other books given to me over the years but these are precious and I will give them away only when my eyes grow too dim to treasure their words.
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Step 5
As your children grow older, encourage them to choose their own books--and to share the books they no longer want by giving them to friends or the local library's "give-away" table. Help your children to see that the gift of a beloved book is an act of generosity. Through this, they will learn that only when the gift has value to the giver is the giving truly an act of love.
