my reader
The other morning I asked D to get dressed, and when I went into his room 10 minutes later to check on him, I found him sitting in his underwear reading. I just had to laugh, because I can’t tell you the number of times my mom found me with one sock on, reading or just staring into space. While it can be annoying to have to repeat myself 3 times before it registers on him that I’ve even said anything, I’m just pleased as punch that he’s becoming a real reader.
On the other hand, I’m sort of selfishly bummed by his choice of reading material, which is almost exclusively manga. He’s read all the Naruto that the library carries, and is now working his way through the Yu-Gi-Oh books. It’s not that I think that comics aren’t "real" reading –but it’s not the stories that I dreamed about sharing with my children. D still wants to be read to, but he’s less and less willing to let me pick the stories, and has almost no patience for chapter books of any sort.
Added to clarify: I’m thrilled that he’s reading, regardless of the content. But there are so many books that I was personally looking forward to reading with him that he’s not interested in…. He won’t watch baseball with me either.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Nick (10) loves manga, especially Naruto. Also Yu-gi-oh. They’re tough for read-alouds, but for a lot of kids (more boys than girls, I think, though there are lots that appeal to girls too) they really are the preferred read-alones. I’m not good at reading graphic novels/manga–I have to go too slowly to take in all the visual info, and I’m just not that visual. But I think they can be really good for kids who are more visually attuned.
I just ordered the Moomin comics (I didn’t know there *were* Moomin comics until just recently) in the hope that they may work as read-alouds. I’ll let you know…
September 28th, 2007 at 12:59 am
You can complain all you want about him reading only manga in a couple of years, but right now? He’s *6*. The fact that he can read stuff at that level at all is AWESOME. Trust me. N is still plowing through the BOB books…I’d take manga any day. (Though he is FINALLY letting me read ‘real’ chapter books to him…He’s been absolutely CAPTIVATED by the Catwings books by Ursula LeGuin. So has Em, actually, even at 10.)
September 28th, 2007 at 1:44 am
what libby said.
my ds decided to *enjoy* reading when he was about 20. torture for me, til then, but ever so sweet when it finally arrived.
bask, my dear, bask.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:15 am
For us, with our number two, the magic books were the Captain Underpants series. And now he is utterly captivated by Calvin&Hobbes. My own mother was pretty frustrated that I spent hours-and-hours with the Hardy Boys. Once they are caught by the reading bug, they’ll get there. Number one has read all of the Harry Potter books and wanted a book of NFL statistics from the Scholastic Book sale at school. They don’t have to want what I want them to want, I keep reminding myself. They’ll get there.
September 28th, 2007 at 9:40 am
I wonder how long the kids will want to read more-or-less the same stuff I want to read, too.
I’m lucky right now, because Wilder fell head-first into Calvin & Hobbes, and that’s what we find him reading in the mornings, pants half-on/half-off, or that he carries up the stairs with him. I’m positively giddy to see him reading (boys! reading! it’s supposed to be Such! A! Big! Deal! even though, cough cough, the lack of sustained male interest in reading and formal schooling generally for the last century-plus has not noticeably hurt adult male achievement) and I love C&H (those were my books he found) so it’s all good. And the Captain Underpants amused me because it reminded me of me as a childhood reader.
Calder bought up three choose-your-own-adventure stories for the kids on our day away (hey, a good day for me includes the bookstore) and was reasonably disappointed when I pointed out that it would be a Bad Thing if the kids ended up dead thanks to their choices, what with their general freakishness about bad endings to stories right now. So those are put away for the moment, and I hope he gets his wish and they enjoy them someday.
I have no memory of reading with either of my parents — reading together was just not something that happened at our house, my mom was thrilled when I was reading because it freed her attention for other things, so why would she read WITH me? I sometimes worry that I’m ruining some of my favorite stories for the kids (the Littles series, for example) because it seems to me that some of my childhood delight in reading was that the worlds I entered didn’t involve adults.
OTOH again, we’re re-reading the Littles in bits and pieces, and even though we’ve read all of them before, it was 18 months ago and the kids don’t remember the plots.
Ah, I love to think and talk about this stuff.
None of my kids has discovered Manga yet. Would you recommend that I throw some in their way? I was considering getting Wilder the comic-book stories of the Star Wars movies for Christmas — he loves those stories, and it would be a way for him to learn about episodes 2 & 3 (which he isn’t allowed to watch) — but I could be convinced to offer something else.
I am anxious for the day when I can introduce the kids to Asterix, too.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:07 am
I have one of those readers, too. She’s a girl, so she enjoys some of the same stuff I did (betsy-tacy, and I’m a big child-fantasy buff, so we share those, too). But, what’s she’s reading now, is the endless “fairy” series (rainbow fairies, flower fairies, jewel fairies, disney fairies). I am not allowed to admit this in front of her, but, they’re pretty hard for me to read, since as far as I can tell, reading one means that you’ve read them all.
I enjoy children’s books, so I’ve actually been reading a lot based on her interests (i.e. we’re sharing books that are new to me), rather than having her read the books I read as a kid. The child fantasy novel business is big right now, so there’s a lot out there, some of it decent (the Sisters Grimm books, for example and “whispering to witches”).
But, I think she’s drifting to the fairy fantasy because the other stuff can get too scary, so I’m just living with it.
I think it’s a lost caues to pick reading for your children; if they’re readers, you just put stuff their way, and hope they read some of the good stuff too, and that occasionally, you’ll have shared interests.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:44 am
My oldest daughter, who is 6, is a big reader. Not too long ago I thought, hey, I loved the Little House series, let me pick those up for her. She’s at the end of Little House on the Prairie right now, so two books in, and I just cringe reading them with her. All the stuff about native americans is just horrible horrible, not to mention the gender role stuff. Although she has at least learned the basics of cheese-and-butter-making.
Turns out that many of the books I loved really deserve a re-read before I hand them over. For example, DD was totally freaked out when Willy Wonka confessed to doing product testing on oompa loompas, some of whom died as a result. Ouch.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Jen, I definitely think that the first two (Laura) Little House books are the worst. The first one opens with a long description of the pig slaughter, and that put my kids right off that book for a year! But the girls read and re-read and re-read again (well, I read to them) These Happy Golden Years, and honestly, I’m so bored with Laura and Almanzo’s courtship, I can’t begin to describe it. My husband says he actually has to leave the room now, he’s that fed up with those two! (No kidding, we’ve read that dumb book FOUR TIMES this year. Argh.)
The Betsy-Tacy books held up really well for me, although we only read up to the one where they get to know the Syrian immigrants on the other side of the hill. The rest start to stray, I think, into teenage romance.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Reading comics with my son (now 3) is one of my top ten parenting fantasies. In my imagination it’s a rainy Saturday afternoon. He’s somewhere between seven and eleven years old, and we’re both sitting on the living room floor, comic books scattered across the floor, him with an A&W, me with a Fat Tire. “Check out this issue of Spider Man,” I say, sliding a book across to him. “This is the one when the Green Goblin attacks the Daily Bugle…”
The root of this fantasy is that when I was a kid, I really wanted my parents–or my dad at least–to read comic books with me. I gave them up when I started high school and then started reading them again shortly after my son was born (you can read the full story of my reverse maturation here: http://daddy-dialectic.blogspot.com/2006/08/jeremy-vs-x-men.html).
Thus the prospect of my son reading comics gives me pleasure, not anxiety. If he doesn’t, I’ll be disappointed…
September 30th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I think six is a tough age for readers. It’s the first time that I felt, as a parent, that my daughter read well enough to enjoy things that I loved as a child, and I definitely have backed off some things that she wouldn’t read at six (but now will at eight). YMMV, of course, but you may find that he grows into sharing books with you again in a year or two.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:35 am
It’s funny you should mention this right now. I’ve been enlisting friends to recommend books for read aloud to my 5-year-old DS. The “girly” stuff I enjoyed is often not his speed. The fantasy genre, as one commentor mentioned, seems popular at this age – he loved, Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander.
Many of the Newberry winners seem to work well as read-aloud for early elementary…but, as Jim Trelawny put it in, The Read Aloud Handbook, one needs to consider both the child’s intellectual and emotional level…I learned that personally by reading, The Swiss Family Robinson to him…a wonderful adventure filled with much killing of wild animals…a part I didn’t remember!
October 1st, 2007 at 10:57 am
My 10 year old is constantly trying to read at times when I don’t think she should be reading. Don’t get me wrong, I love that she is a reader, and I am sympathetic to her desire to find out what happens, but the dinner table is for talking, and there isn’t time in the morning routine to add reading!
She does like a lot of the books I liked, though. I bought her a big anthology of Encyclopedia Brown books, and she told me that she loved it because it had so many plot twists (so cute!). She also loves Nancy Drew and we are reading A Wrinkle in Time together now, which is so much fun. My 5 year old prefers super hero books, but those can be fun, too, and I figure he will get older all too soon, and maybe then he will like the books I want to talk to him about.