I was casually skimming through a book when a sentence caught my attention. The author mentions that an individual's love for reading stems from one or two books. This can happen in various stages of life -from childhood to adulthood. Got me chewing my lip..
I can definitely think back to the first books I've read and enjoyed so much that I had to keep reading the entire series. My launcher books would be Enid Blyton's Famous Five series. Growing up I used to absolutely loathe history until I started reading Tintin and Asterisk comics.
My older son's launcher book was The Foot Book by Dr.Seuss. In fact, I can still remember all the words in order!. He also loved a four box set of the Busytown books by Richard Scarry esp., the Firefighter's Busy Day.
As for my younger one, he never let us read to him as a baby, would grab the book out of our hands and make up a story from the pictures. But one day he discovered Tintin and Asterisk. He was hooked! Now he is a voracious reader, appreciating the difficulty in reading Huck Finn in original, willing to work at it.
Comic Book to Classics is not an impasse. I still long for an Banana sundae a la Archie comics while reading Breton - although I do not really like the complicated tastes in a sundae nor the complicated images in Breton (hopefully my prof is not reading this!).
To me this illustrates how serendipitious reading can be. As parents, we can only expose the children to a variety of books and let the children take it from there.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Reading and writing
Back from a long break. After a tough class, I almost swore off of reading and writing. But old habits die hard. I've written on many topics just in my head, now that I sit down to blog, I have memory loss. Guess I didn't put it on autosave ;)
Anyhow.. school's winding down here. Summer reading begins. We always diligently sign up at the local library for summer reading, but so far have never filled out the log -obviously nothing to turn in. Why not? you ask..
My kids have never willingly written anything. They love to read and I've been able to discuss with them some of the few I've also read, but when asked to write, it will somehow get set aside. At school, most assignments have a scoring rubric. The older one follows it to the T! "It only says two sentences, you know! no extra points for an extra sentence!".
My lecture that a rubric is a helpful tool to help cover all important aspects of the topic is met with a silence from the sofa - the kids have long disappeared at the beginning of my sentence!
So, I gave up. My excuse, writing is to put down original thoughts on a subject. Children do not have enough experience to draw from their frame of reference to write about a book. They may enjoy the work, but do not have much to say about it.
Plus today's writing in a business world is all powerpoint using bulleted entries anyway..
Sour grapes?
Anyhow.. school's winding down here. Summer reading begins. We always diligently sign up at the local library for summer reading, but so far have never filled out the log -obviously nothing to turn in. Why not? you ask..
My kids have never willingly written anything. They love to read and I've been able to discuss with them some of the few I've also read, but when asked to write, it will somehow get set aside. At school, most assignments have a scoring rubric. The older one follows it to the T! "It only says two sentences, you know! no extra points for an extra sentence!".
My lecture that a rubric is a helpful tool to help cover all important aspects of the topic is met with a silence from the sofa - the kids have long disappeared at the beginning of my sentence!
So, I gave up. My excuse, writing is to put down original thoughts on a subject. Children do not have enough experience to draw from their frame of reference to write about a book. They may enjoy the work, but do not have much to say about it.
Plus today's writing in a business world is all powerpoint using bulleted entries anyway..
Sour grapes?
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