Read All About It

At first focusing solely on their own names, Sis and Bud are currently obsessed with spelling, making up combos of letters to see if I know the "word" (i.e. "what does E-O-R-R-T spell?") and asking how to spell words they already know, like "drum," "pancake," and "Shirt." I guess we're officially pre-readers now.

Which is a subject under discussion in my playgroup now. One mom sent a link about reading chapter books to pre-readers, which argues "The traditional time kids start chapter books is when they learn how to read them by themselves. The trouble with this is that it goes against that fact that a child's listening level is higher than the reading level until the teenage years." The website's author, DaddyRead advocates to begin reading chapter books, at least 50% of the time, with children as young as 3, who will gain from the use of their imaginations (vs. relying on pictures), the real-life stories, and the continuous chapter structure (to loosely paraphrase). Of course, as an art historian, it's important to me that there are still picture books especially after children have learned to read chapter books in order to foster visual thinking skills. But we're gonig to try the chapter books, just for fun, after several moms reported positive responses. Today at the bookstore, we purchased two books in the recommended Mary Pope Osborne series, The Magic Tree House about siblings who travel through time, in our two books, to meet a saber-tooth tiger and also the dinosaurs. There are other books on China, the Revolutionary War, knights, mummies, and pirates. Truly, Mama and I were excited to choose several titles and had to restrict ourselves to one for each kid (well, and the historical study guides with the facts behind the novels.) We'll see how it goes.

But I'm not trying to push the reading thing, even if people at the table next to us this morning must have thought I was an overly ambitious mother as I stressed the sounds in "drum" and tried to get them to guess the letters, which they did (though that "u" is tricky). It's not scientific. I'm not even sure I'm "supposed" to be doing this. I'm just trying to respond to their questions. Which are constant, including Sis's extraordinary, "Mommy, does that say 'zoo'" when spotting the word on the restaurant placemat on Saturday. I think she read that. They're also both memorizing more books and songs right now, even the notecard I put in Sis's lunch which she had me read at breakfast and then repeated over and over again.

I'm all for keeping summer "academic-free" in the homework sense of the word and found myself overreacting at the library earlier this summer when I came across the school district's required summer reading program, complete with specified time amounts and book reports. Required, my butt. Try and make me. The whole tone of the letter, trumpeting the "joy of reading," belied what the program will really do: fail. Kids who would read for fun will be turned off by all the work; kids who wouldn't have read for fun won't and then be penalized at school, just what you want for at-risk students. I suddenly had visions of homeschooling just to avoid such misguided programs! Or visions of mom-against-the-school when I adamantly refused to have them participate. Or finally, visions of compromise as I realized that school is often (in good training for life) about learning how to jump through silly hoops successfully so you can move along to what you like better (i.e. how I define doing math homework and science fair).

But I did like reading about programs that now let children choose their reading material. My favorite English class in high school was a yearlong self-directed study: we designed a theme for each grading period and reported on our books creatively at the end. I can't remember most of what I read, specifically, if you were to ask for titles, though I did a section on American classics (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway--stuff I wasn't getting in my American lit class), mythology, Phantom of the Opera. One student did all year on Edith Wharton. Looking back, I'd love to have done a year on women writers like Austen or Eliot. And Wharton. But it was having the power to decide for myself and following through with my choices that I most valued.

Which is why, just like my mom, I have trouble saying "no" when my kids express an interest in a book, at the bookstore, yard sales, even the library. I don't (really) care if they want Dora or the Bearnstain Bears or yet another book on dinos, even if those wouldn't be my choices for them, as long as they want to read. And so, on the ride to and from the restaurant, and even while we were there, we all poured over the book orders they got today, very excited about the chance to choose our next books, discussing and debating and changing choices several times (I think Sis is going with Clifford, Bud with Skippyjon Jones finds Bones, and I'm thinking about The House in the Night, the 2009 Caldecott). Reading them will come soon enough.