Tag: reading

Getting Kids to read

Some of us seem to be born readers.  The love of a story is embedded within our DNA.  We have gravitated to books from babyhood.  Unfortunately, this is not true for everyone. Many of the students I work with will avoid reading at any cost.

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 It is my firm belief that everyone can find enjoyment in reading.  They just need to find the right book for them. I have spent my career trying to match kids to books. This is easier said than done, but I’ve made progress.

Here are some tips:

  • Be open to less traditional reading- comics, graphic novels, video game manuals etc. lead to other reading
  • Devote specific time to free choice reading
  • Do not react when they tell you they hate reading, you’ll drive them further away
  • Get recommendations from other kids, they’ll take it more seriously
  • Give them easy access to a variety of books
  • Pay attention to which books are being made into movies, and get them interested in reading the book first
  • Read aloud the first in a series, so that they will be motivated to go to book two
  • Talk about your own reading interests
  • Topics almost every kid loves reading about: animals, humor, adventure stories

Optometrist or Torturer?

There are people who read for necessity. Then there are people who read for pleasure. Finally, there are people for whom reading borders on addiction. I am one of the latter.

Yesterday I had an eye doctor appointment. As part of the examination, the doctor handed me a story and asked me to read the first line. The good news: In my mid-forties, I can still read the fine print without contacts or glasses. The bad news: I only read the first line, and then it was taken away. It had something to do with a boat (there’s a small chance it could’ve been a boot, the writing was very small).

You cannot leave a reader hanging like that. Where were they taking the boat? What kind of boat was it? Were they on an island? If it was a boot, what were they doing with it? I needed to know.

 Since everything I read is filed away somewhere in my brain (unfortunately the same isn’t true of details like where I parked the car), it sparked a memory of reading the same line at my last appointment. The least they could’ve done was let me read the second line this time. Then maybe by the time I turn 200, I will have gotten the entire story.  

When she left me alone to wait for my eyes to dilate, the card was still on the shelf. My hands itched to grab it and read the rest of the story. Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished filling out insurance forms before my appointment, and I was in a rush to finish while I could still see to write. Therefore, when my doctor returned I was innocently sitting in the chair with my completed paperwork, pupils dilated, and still hadn’t read the next line.

Still haunted by that boat, I returned home. I knew it would take a while for my pupils to return to normal, so I turned on a Friends rerun rather than trying to read. Still, I couldn’t resist. Every time there was a commercial, I was compelled to open an email or grab a book, but I couldn’t focus my eyes. It was as if I was being denied a basic need. By the time Rachel got off the plane, my eyes had cleared. I spent the afternoon reading and writing, just because I could. It was like gorging after a diet.

I googled the line to see what happened to the boat. It must not have been from an actual piece of literature because all I found was a bunch of deals on dinner cruises. Nothing with a boot either.

My journey in books

It all started with a dirty dog named Harry. Before I could read myself, I loved hearing stories. Mom always read me a book before I went to bed each night: Mother Goose, Amanda and Oliver Pig, a volume of Sesame Street books that arrived monthly just to name a few. But Harry the Dirty Dog was my favorite. My favorite page was when Harry, now a black dog with white spots, does tricks in an attempt to prove his identity, but the family still doesn’t recognize him. Harry was just the beginning.

Once I was able to read myself, I started reading chapter books. I remember laughing aloud at the antics of Ramona Quimby and Fudge Hatcher.  So, while  Harry taught me to love stories, Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary taught me to love reading.

 Then, Laura Ingalls Wilder turned me into a person who defines herself as a reader. The Little House books were the first books I truly fell in love with and I was hooked for life. I was the teenager whose family had to make pit stops on vacations to buy more books. I was always reading multiple books at once, and with minimal prompting could probably tell you plots of books I read thirty years ago. The majority of my teen reading was teen angst-type novels. I flew through Linda A. Cooney’s Freshman Dorm series faster than she could write them.

My reading shifted in college. With all the required reading, I didn’t have much time for pleasure reading. However, while the quantity decreased, the quality of my reading increased. The girl across the hall freshman year introduced me to Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, my favorite classics. Even if she didn’t turn out to be one of my best friends, she would hold a special spot in my heart just for that. In addition to Austen and the Brontës, I read through a list of classics from the university library. I was now an adult reader.

Once I graduated college and was teaching, I acquainted myself with newer children’s and young adult literature. Everyone was talking about the Harry Potter series, so I decided to read book one with my summer school class. I devoured the next books, then had to wait for the next one to be completed. Later, colleagues were appalled when I described the fantastic new book I had read about children in an arena trying to kill each other called The Hunger Games.

So, I went along for several years, reading popular children’s books and  frequenting the local library to find new releases that piqued my interest. Then my friend (the same one who introduced me to Austen and Eyre) changed my life again. She told me she’d signed up to the websites goodreads and paperbackswap. I soon followed. Thanks to goodreads lists I was aware of authors and genres I didn’t even know existed, and thanks to paperbackswap I could get them for the price of postage.

Now I’m in a new phase of reading. The reader/writer phase. You read enough books, and you start to think: how hard could it be to write one?  (spoiler: it’s really hard).  As I write more myself, I have a whole new appreciation of the authors’ craft as I read. Because no matter how much I enjoy writing, there’s nothing like reading a well written book. If I ever do get published, it’ll be in part thanks to a dog who didn’t want to take a bath.

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