Gifts for Kids: Reading Nook

"Victor is a great reader!" My mom was intrigued by my statement. How can her grandson be a great reader when he recently turned only 3? Ok, he may not be able to read on his own yet but this doesn't make him less of a reader (for his age): he loves being read to, enjoys spending  time looking through his books and checking them out at the library -this may be mainly because he likes passing all the materials under the scanner. There was one time when he didn't want to return one book at the library and I had to take him to the store and replace it. (It  was "Green eggs and ham" by Dr. Seuss).

Considering all these, my hubby and I decided to make a reading nook for Victor as his birthday gift. We even had the perfect place for it: the basement, under the staircase.

We started planning, sewing (I sewed the cushion and pillows myself) and buying all the necessary things (lights, book shelves aka IKEA spice rakes, magnetic boards and letters, photo frames) weeks before his birthday but couldn't put everything together until the night before. Now that it's cold outside the kids spend more time in the basement and would have seen that there was something going on. We didn't want to spoil the surprise.

After he came from pre-school that morning we were able to show it to him and boy, was he surprised!

The books are either received as gifts from his friends (we asked his birthday party guests to bring books) or bought by me from the Half Price Book sale. If you are a book lover I totally recommend checking out the annual Half Price Book sale. It takes place in October for an entire weekend on the State Fair grounds and the books are priced $3 and less. Plus on Sunday all the materials (books, DVDs, CDs) are 50% off the initial price. Up until this year the books were organized into fiction and non-fiction but they finally decided to sort the non-fiction books out by subject and this makes it really easy to go through them and find something that you like.

Victor loves his place under the staircase, he goes there either to read his books and magazines or play with the light (turning it on and off seems like a big entertainment for both my boys these days).

Happy Thanksgiving!
Stef

Check out here other non-toy gifts for kids.