Check Means Book

Once upon a time the little Papachilalala was a well-known book worm.
Parents still reminds me that every night,I had my favorite books all around my bed and a Care Bear in my arm to fall asleep.(I had access to these hip American toys through my aunt who lived in CT)

Twenty years later, whenever I go into the classrooms to observe my clients, the kids would pull out their favorite books and wait in a line next to where I am sitting. They seem to love it when adults read books to them. So is it the book that they love, or the story teller? Either way, I start my art therapy session with story telling. We compromise on books each week, since there are more than one book requested.

I hop in my time machine back to twenty years ago. I think I felt mostly excited about the pictures in the books - I favored books by the illustration. I remembered loving the follwing type of images ....

Likely to be seen in a real life, but definitely a fantasy. I felt happy finding real objects in the pictures that do not look so realistic. For example, endless blankets piled up all the way to the ceiling, or taking a bath in the shoe shaped bath tub. I enjoyed such detailed images and staring at them forever. I would find new things everytime I open the book, even though it happened everyday. Obviously those books became "my favorite."

I also liked fairies in the stories. Not the whole story about faries though. I liked it when unexpected fairies randomly popped up!

The above images are from the books I used to own, but similar - I've saved these images from the web for references. Some of you might wonder about Korean children's books. When I was little, there were only a few children's books written by Korean authors (traditional folk tales), though I find a lot more these days. I was also interested in those book, yet I did not enjoy so much because of the images not so interesting to me.

My kids at my internship seem to love stories about animals. These two 2-yr-old boys I meet every Wednesday giggle the whole time while I flip every page of this book about an animal farm. I worry about them falling from the endless giggles. Each page in this book has an image that is packed with TONS of animals (killer crowd). They love to point and name the animals they already know (which doesn't take too long compared to the insane images). I do this counting every session as the opening/closing ritual.
Books are awesome!