Tuesday, January 25, 2011

How to get your children to bed.

A few months back we were having a hard time getting our DD7 to fall asleep at the same bedtime as her younger siblings. So we arrived at a compromise and purchased a small lamp for her bed and she can now stay up and read for an hour before falling asleep.

Then we hit another bump on this road, when she got bored with the books we had available at home. Although we borrow about 30 books every 2 weeks from the library, from time to time, my DD7 can find that she has read everything.

The solution was to let her borrow my Kindle. My husband purchased it for me last September and I used it for a few days until we found out that we could upload free books that DD7 was reading. She was reading The Secret Garden, the Velveteen Rabbit, Aesop's Fables and more. All those and many more can be uploaded for free or $0.99 on the Kindle. Then she carries the little flat device to her bed and reads to her heart content.

I can tell you that the Kindle is no longer mine. I have gone back to purchasing real books since the Kindle sleeps on my DD7 bed next to her other stuffed animals and favorite toys and magazines.

My personal opinion: The Kindle is very easy to operate, any child that can use a cell phone, laptop or computer game can use the Kindle. There are safety features where you can turn the wireless connection off and they cannot download anything to the Kindle. There is also the feature to open folders and file the books accordingly. Our DD7 has her own folder which she knows all books there are safe for her to read. All other folders are off limits. Although the Kindle displays only in black and white, the illustrations are still gorgeous and very entertaining to a child.

If you have someone that loves to read, or is learning to read (the Kindle has a feature that will read the book to you in a male or female voice) the Kindle is the perfect gift to jump start or encourage your beginner or avid reader. It also has a dictionary and many other features like changing the size of the font, displaying the book vertically or horizontally, bookmarking, highlighting and more. Just figuring out all the features it has can be very entertaining if you are a computer Wyzard like my DH.

I hope it helps get your child to bed... it has helped mine. :)

Tereza

1 comment:

Far Above Rubies said...

Tereza, I've heard a lot about Kindle, and was thinking about purchasing one in the future for my own use. However, I have a DD10 who loves to read so I don't think it will be mine for long. ;-)


Thanks for linking up to Domestically Divine. Look forward to hearing from you in the future.

God bless,

Jasmine