Reading aloud

The Frugal Mama blog devotes today’s post to a useful reminder about the importance of reading to children. As Amy writes, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s really the best investment of recreational time you can possibly make with your kids.

Amy’s post outlines a recent talk she attended by a childhood literacy expert who not only talked about reading but also offered numerous variations on the theme: that is, literacy-related activities, such as making up rhymes or writing letters, that go beyond the traditional reading-a-story-together scenario.

My children, at ages 7 and 11, are both able to read to themselves, so it’s interesting to see how reading aloud fits into their development at this point. Like plenty of kids his age, Tim, in fifth grade, has essentially the habits of an adult reader: he chooses his own books at the library or bookstore and reads them to himself. But when I’m reading to Holly, I’m often amused to see him sidling into the room to listen. When we were reading the Little House on the Prairie series last year, he seemed to show up frequently during reading time, and sometimes he’d ask me questions about the books. It’s not a series he would have chosen to read on his own – too girlie and too young for me, he would have said – but the allure of hearing me read the stories proved irresistible much of the time.

For Holly, being read to is still an nonnegotiable part of her evening routine. Now that she chooses chapter books, sometimes she’ll continue on her own after I tell her it’s time to go to bed – she’s generally allowed to keep the light on to read for another 15 minutes or so – and then she takes great pains the next night to update me on any plot development that I missed, but she also usually then decides to backtrack and have me read aloud the same chapters she read. It’s important to remember that kids love to hear their parents read even after they can read on their own, and it’s not uncommon for children to resist learning to read – or at least to resist admitting that they’ve learned – because they fear it will mean subsequently losing the ritual of having their parents read to them.

Recently Holly’s love of reading has transitioned rapidly into a fascination with writing. Now, beyond the school writing assignments she’s had ever since kindergarten, she’s been spending a lot of time at home writing stories. For a while she was writing on small squares of paper and stapling them together into little books; then I came up with the idea of starting her own blog on which she could post her stories. This gave her the thrill of seeing her work in what looked like published form, and also made it easy for her to brag about – I mean share – her stories with her grandparents, teachers, aunts and other interested in parties. (Re. security, I set the blog settings to private and non-searchable, so it’s very unlikely that a stranger will happen across her work.)

Then last month she undertook a more complicated task. She decided to write a chapter book. More specifically, she decided to dictate to me a chapter book. Where once we would spend 30 minutes or so reading together before bed, the new ritual is that she lies on the floor under my desk, gazing up at me and spinning the adventures of Louise the Writer out of her imagination. It’s not bad stuff, though I don’t think she’s any Mozart of the written word. Though derivative in parts – some aspects of Louise’s life, including the protagonist’s name, correlate undeniably to the fact that we recently started reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh – there are some very clever and original aspects as well. In the chapter Holly wrote last night, Louise’s father gets fired from his job as a kennel manager and confesses to the family that what he really wants is to try his hand at being a plumber.

I was a little concerned when it came time for Holly to fill out her weekly reading log for school last night. I hadn’t realized that our work on “Louise the Writer” had detracted significantly from the time we normally spend reading. When Holly saw the gaps in her reading log, she filled in the name of her own book, listing herself as author, so that it wouldn’t look to her teacher like she’d been sitting idle.

I’m hoping we manage soon to re-integrate nightly reading into our schedule, since I don’t think writing her own book should be a substitute for Holly’s reading habits. Good writers do both: write a lot but also read a lot. Otherwise we writers would be boring. As Amy points out in her blog post, reading aloud is the best way to start a lifelong appreciation for books, words, reading, speaking, and writing. And it’s good for all of us to find more time to do it.