More Great Books for Maine Kids – August 2011 Newsletter

Read about the very special program that gives books to Maine kindergartners each year and learn when and how to read with the toddlers in your life.

Reading With Older Kids

Raising Reader Guest Blogger:
Penny Noyce
Guest Blogger, Penny Noyce is the author of the new children’s book, Lost in Lexicon. In the novel for readers ages 8-12, Daphne and Ivan, travel to a world riddled with forgetting and fragmented by their loss of words, numbers, and understanding.

One of the heroines of the novel, Aunt Adelaide, is modeled after Penny Noyce’s mother Betty Noyce who founded the Libra Foundation. Penny Noyce chairs the board of the Libra Foundation which generously funds Raising Readers. How appropriate to have a novelist and lover of words driving a program that has brought more than 1.3 million books to Maine children.

Reading With Older Kids
We’re all convinced of the benefits of reading to young children, but what about reading with older kids?

When my twins were in fifth grade, they received the following English assignment: Choose an adventure book to read together with one of your parents. As you read, write notes to each other about your reactions, thoughts, and questions. Communicate in writing about the book!

My son Owen and I chose to read Into Thin Air, John Krakauer’s harrowing account of the 1996 Everest climbing season, when the latest in adventure tourism went terribly wrong. Two teams of fit, semi-experienced climbers paid $60,000 each for a “guaranteed” chance at scaling Everest. When a storm howled in, three tourists and two tour leaders perished.

I loved the assignment, and Owen enjoyed it, too. We passed the book back and forth, wrote notes on the computer, and (even) talked about the book. I shared my surprise that the Everest climbers were miserable from the start, beset by insomnia, headache, and hacking cough. Owen shared his sense of the beauty of the mountain and the lonely horror of freezing to death.

Recently, a fifth grade teacher in my wealthy suburban community told me they don’t give that assignment anymore: Too many parents complained.

Parents complained?

Maybe they were too busy traveling for work to read. But couldn’t they use a Kindle on the plane and text their remarks to their children? Maybe they worried the books would bore them. But couldn’t they negotiate with their children for a book that would captivate both of them? Or maybe the parents were afraid of getting a bad grade on the assignment.

As a society, we have embraced the idea of reading to kids too young to read for themselves. Often, though, we forget the value of shared reading experiences as our kids grow older.

I was one of four children, and long after we were proficient readers, we still cuddled on the couch to listen to my mother read to us every night. She didn’t “do the voices” like an actress. She just read in her steady, calming tone; and we listened, learning to pay attention and paint pictures in our minds.

Listening to an adult read aloud exposes children to vocabulary in context, complex sentence structure, and a continuous train of thought. These are all good tools for enhancing children’s thinking, but even better is the shared intimacy of these moments. We don’t have to give them up as our children approach middle school. Even when we don’t read aloud, we can still share bedtime reading, lolling together on the couch or bed, each reading our own book, exchanging comments from time to time.

My father and brother both liked science fiction. Sometimes, on vacation, when there weren’t enough unread books to go around, the first reader tore off sections of a paperback book as he finished them and passed them on to the second reader. I’m not advocating book dismemberment, but what a message about shared enthusiasm!

You and your children can always recommend books to one another. My son Damian’s suggestions have grown from his passionate advocacy of Tony Abbott’s Droon series through his romance with Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl to his current insistence that I read Here, There Be Dragons by James A. Owen. To tell the truth, I can’t keep up with him, but we do enough common reading that we can always discuss why characters do what they do or how it would be to live in another world. (One friend of mine tells me that the Harry Potter books provided dinner conversation for years.) I reciprocate by saving newspaper or magazine articles for Damian, choosing books from the library I know he’ll like, or sending him links to stories on the web.

By reading books together, we keep communication lines open and share our interests, aspirations, and inner worlds in a way that’s oblique, not too confrontational or embarrassing. Nobody gives us a grade.

(This post original appeared on View from the Windowseat)

Books in the Home

166,000 individual Maine children have received books from Raising Readers for their home libraries in the last ten years. We all know intuitively that this is a positive thing for the children of the state, but a new national study confirms the positive link between books in the home and children that do well in school.

A University of Nevada, Reno study showed that children raised in a home where they were exposed to 500 books would go 3.2 years further in their education, on average. 500 books? Who has 500 books in their home?

The importance in not the number of books but that there is a relationship between school success and books in the home. By the time your Maine child reaches the age of five, she will have received up to twelve books from Raising Readers. How do you expose your child to more books beyond her home library? Use a Maine library.

If you took two picture books home from the public library each week started when your child is a toddler, think of how many books would pass through your home. Use that library card to turn your home into a learning rich place for your future student to grow up in!