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Strollerderby
Proud of my reader and I'm the furthest thing from a Tiger mom.
In today’s tumultuous parenting times, you never know what topic is going to end up being controversial. I mean, could teaching a toddler to read be a hot topic? What about pride in NOT teaching your kid to read?
As Rhiana Maidenberg writes for The Huffington Post, “My four-year-old daughter is illiterate. She can only sight read her own name, has not memorized short board books, and can barely write five letters of the alphabet. I am more than fine with all of this. In fact, I am proud.”
Maidenberg goes on to explain she’s proud of the fact her daughter’s can’t read because “infants and toddlers have much more valuable things to be doing with their time: finger painting, running in circles, jumping on couches, pot-and-pan beating, and annoying their siblings.” She and her husband send their daughters to a “play-based” preschool, where the alphabet isn’t introduced until the pre-k program.
Still, as much as she touts this parenting choice, Maidenberg admits to questioning her approach to reading:
Unfortunately, living in this supermommy environment, where all children are untapped tiny geniuses, I cannot visit the playground without overhearing a mother brag about how her three-year-old spends hours reading to herself and her younger brother. And, as an overly self-critical mother, whose mommy guilt only swells with each BabyCenter milestone email, I am constantly second-guessing these choices.
I get it. I not only respect her parenting choice, but I totally get it. I too, hate those Your Baby Can Read infomercials. Kids need to be kids for a whole lot longer than their parents are allowing. You smell a “but” coming don’t you?
You’re right. BUT…
When Alice Ozma left home to go to college, the hardest part was giving up her bedtime stories. Her father had been reading to her every night for over 9 years, since her parents split up when she was in 4th grade.
At the beginning, the nightly reading was a way to find stability and togetherness during a rough period. They agreed to read together every night for 100 days. But at the end of that hundred days they just kept going. For the rest of her childhood. All told, they logged 3,218 nights of reading.
Now Ozma has written a book about the experience, called The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared. In it, she not only shares her own stories but offers tips to families on how they can start reading streaks of their own.
Any child can learn to love books.
Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson series, has created a world in which the hero is a young boy who has ADHD and dyslexia. In the stories, those two characteristics are indicators of Olympian blood, meaning kids with ADHD and dyslexia stand a good chance of having been descended from the gods. But in the real world, kids with such learning differences can find it difficult to even read such a book, let alone be made to feel heroic because of it.
To give the main character of an action adventure book series ADHD and dyslexia might seem a little unusual, but the author had a good reason for doing so. His own son, 16-year-old Haley, also has ADHD and dyslexia and Riordan says the novels began as a desperate attempt to keep his child interested in reading.
Riordan says that as a 7-year-old, Haley hated reading so much that he would hide under a table to avoid it. But today, Haley is not only an avid reader, but he’s also the proud author of his very own six-hundred-page manuscript. How did Riordan manage that? Continue reading »
Why won't boys read?
If you have a son who is a reluctant reader, despite the fact that his sister will sit for hours paging through the books on her shelf, you’re apparently in good company. Considerably more boys than girls aren’t meeting proficiency level standards on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading report, according to a recent Center on Education Policy report.
“This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls,” Thomas Spence noted in the Wall Street Journal last week. “The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.”
Spence, the president of Spence Publishing Company, thinks he knows why boys aren’t reading enough to get their skills up to proficiency level. It’s not that we’re not giving them books that they’re interested. After all, the publishing industry is now meeting boys “where they are” with a whole gross-out genre of books aiming to appeal to elementary- and middle-school boys predilection for body humor, he argues.
Spence names this trend, charmingly, the “SweetFarts philosophy of education,” after a book, “SweetFarts” written by a self-published author who goes by the nom de plume Raymond Bean. “One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals,” Spence asserts. “If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.”
So if it’s not the reading material itself, why are so many fewer boys reading books – and mastering reading proficiency – than girls?
Interactive books with pop-up pictures and pull-tab features give kids more to do with a book than just look at a page. But while it would stand to reason that with more to do, a child would be more engaged and therefore more likely to learn something from a book, experts say that’s just not the case. In fact, new new research finds that all that popping up and pulling open is actually a distraction and that these interactive books are inferior to traditional ones when it comes to imparting lessons to pre-readers. Continue reading »
Not sold on the benefits of summer reading? Persuaded by your second-graders argument that a vacation should really be a vacation, and reading is too much like school?
Then add today’s Well blog post to your own summer reading list. In it, Tara Parker-Pope tackles some of the research behind your school’s and libraries ubiquitous reading programs. Turns out, those books are good for more than just gold stars from your neighborhood librarian.
The “summer slide” in reading skills is well documented, and effects low income students most. A new study shows that just giving kids books – any books – makes up for that lost time in a big way.
Reading on the Kindle app. (Recognize the book?)
Summer slide. That’s what they call it when kids’ skills slip over vacation, and teachers say they spend the first few weeks of every school year hauling their students back to where they were before the final bell rang. The number one recommendation for limiting the slippage isn’t workbooks with a page for ever day of summer break (we’ve tried those here, and most of them are around the house somewhere, with about nine pages complete). It’s reading. Reading anything, reading everything. Which sounds so easy…
Is there anyone out there who’s not trying to figure out how to get a kid to read more this summer? Bethany did a post on it yesterday, offering cute tips. I love the outdoor book nook–that would have had me reading in a second as a kid.
But everything had me reading in a second. I love to read. I spent my youth with my “head in a book,” and I even co-authored a book about reading with young children. I never expected to give the question of “reading enough” a thought when I had kids. I have put every book I loved, and plenty I didn’t, in front of my rising fourth grader and met with what can only be called supreme indifference. He’ll read, sure. But he’d rather do just about anything else.
So when I see something like the Chicago Tribune’s How to Get Kids Reading This Summer, I click. I’ll try anything. The problem is, I feel like I’ve already tried everything. Continue reading »
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