Creating Family Books: My Daddy Sleeps at Google

We read My Teacher Sleeps in School by Leatie Weiss earlier this week and thought it was pretty funny. This was a favorite of mine to read to my students the first week of school. When I asked my son where I sleep... he said, "the kitchen!" (bc I love to bake a lot). We decided to write our own simple repetitive book so that my little one could practice "reading" and we based it on Leatie Weiss' book.

First I made a cover for the book and stuck the pages inside a view binder.

After we made a book about me, we made one about my husband (who works at Google). We all wish we could live there full time. 🙂

I started off by making a page template for the story with a sentence starter- "My mommy sleeps..." (or "My daddy sleeps...")

During dinner we talked about the story and I read the sentence starter and my son filled in the blank. His ideas of where in the kitchen I would sleep were pretty silly. We had a good time laughing about me sleeping in the trash can.

While he ate, I drew pictures of me sleeping in each of the places. I am not a great artist, some of these are terrible (like me looking like a horse in the microwave)... but at least he knew what they were showing. Then I cut out the pictures.

After dinner I read each page of the story and we worked on listening comprehension skills... I read a page and he tried to match the picture to the correct page that I was talking about. His ideas included having me sleep in the trash can, microwave, a drawer, the oven, and the sink. His dad slept in the ball pit, on a volleyball net, in the bowling alley, on top of a medicine ball, and underneath the Android robot.

Once we were done matching the pictures to the pages, we taped the pictures on and stuck each page inside a plastic sheet protector and then we put the pages inside our binder book.

Then we did the same thing for our story about Google. He wasn't feeling like coloring the pictures that day, so I left them colorless for now. I want this to be his book and I want him to color them, so when he's ready, that part will be done.

These books were silly to write and were a great opportunity to teach my son some basic reading skills. We talked about how we can look at the pictures in a book if we don't know what the words say. The ability to access pictures while reading and make a guess as to what the words say is a really important reading skill! Since the sentences in our book are very repetitive, they are easy to memorize. As we read, we practiced touching each word as we said each one. Tracking words (with fingers or eyes) in stories is also an important reading skill. Memorizing stories is another great pre-reading skill. My son loves "reading" the stories that he helped write.

We will definitely be creating more family books in the future!