Bringing Up Bookmonsters
The Joyful Way to Turn Your Child into a Fearless, Ravenous Reader
by Amber Ankowski, PhD and Andy Ankowski
What Bookmonsters is All About
A playful guide to raising kids who love reading—perfect for parents trying to fill educational gaps at home
How can you turn your distracted, plugged-in child into a voracious reader eager to devour every book in sight? By speaking to their inner bookmonster, of course! In Bringing Up Bookmonsters, wife-and-husband team Amber and Andy Ankowski suggest fun strategies rooted in developmental psychology—absolutely no flashcards or timers required.
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Talk to your baby bookmonster: Narrate your actions as you do chores and have babble “conversations.” A love of reading starts at birth with a love of language!
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Build a bookmonster habitat: Keep books in the toy box and alphabet magnets on the fridge.
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Turn storytime into playtime: Try making mistakes your bookmonster will catch. (“Let’s read The Dog in the Hat!”)
From playing literacy-building games in the car to filling your home library to adapting screen time, raising your bookmonster can be a whole lot of ferocious fun!
About the authors
Amber Ankowski earned her PhD in developmental psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she teaches undergraduate courses on topics related to children’s language and cognitive development and methods for conducting psychological research. She has been published in academic journals including Child Development Research, Infant and Child Development, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Andy Ankowski is an award-winning advertising creative director who specializes in explaining complex products and services in simple—and often laugh-out-loud funny—ways. He studied creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, and once wrote 365 poems about onion bagels in a single year.
Together, Amber and Andy are parenting speakers, bloggers at doctoranddad.com, authors of Think Like a Baby: 33 Simple Research Experiments You Can Do at Home to Better Understand Your Child’s Developing Mind and Goodnight Zoom, and parents of three fantastically ferocious bookmonsters.
