Why your teens must read—every day!

this article on reading is so very compelling.

Did you know that many, many children stop reading in their teenage years? I've spoken to mothers, great mothers, who shake their heads and mourn the fact that their teenage children don't read. They blame this decline in reading on a lack of good books for teens, our current pop culture, and the busyness of school.

I don't know the answers for this problem—my oldest is just becoming a teenager—but I do know that this is a grave problem, and it deserves more than a shake of the head as exemplified by the points in this article.

Reading is not something to mess around with. If we want to stay vibrant culturally, economically, spiritually as a country, we must read. We must.

This article (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts) makes it very clear, Americans are reading books at significantly lower rates than they were twenty years ago. Reading comprehension skills are eroding. These declines have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications.

Here's a sample of the statistics in this report:

 Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers. • The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period. Yet the amount they read for school or home- work (15 or fewer pages daily for 62% of students) has stayed the same.

If Americans overall are reading less, should it surprise us that our teenagers are reading less?

Several years ago, I went to a church congregation where many of the teenagers skipped Sunday School to go hang out in the parking lot. Quite a few adults bemoaned this. There was a great deal of discussion on how to motivate these teens to go to their church classes. But most of this bemoaning was done during adult Sunday School—a class many of the adults themselves were skipping. 

How could we expect our teens to go to Sunday School when many of the adults were not?

How can we expect our teens to read when we do not? 

I really believe if the adults in this country read for fun, on a daily basis, the teens would too. Then we wouldn't have a high school drop out rate of nearly thirty percent. Kids wouldn't need reading comprehension strategies. They would know how to read because they read. Often. 

The entire world would be a better place. 

Has your entire family given these books a try?

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart and its sequels. This series is a family favorite—a family affair. Even Sam has partaken and even Sam has loved them. 

If you haven't tried them—please do! They aren't for everyone, but they are for many, and they just might get a teen in your home reading again. Because texting just doesn't count.

Reading Prevents Alzheimer's

Probably.

this article about Alzheimer's disease, without being conclusive (because what studies are conclusive), explains that people who read are two and a half times less likely to have Alzheimer's disease, whereas TV watching may actually be a risk factor for getting Alzheimer's.

TV may indeed rot your brain and reading may indeed grow it. Maybe.

If you do decide to be bold and daring and turn off the TV this summer (you won't regret it!), you can use this article as ammunition. You can proclaim this summer an experiment. You can ask them if they can feel their brains growing as they read or play or do other intellectually stimulating activities as opposed to when they used to watch TV and play video games. You could involve them in the process and the decision. You could sit them down and explain to them the benefits of reading and how you want them to live long, satisfied lives. Summer is the chance to separate test scores and multiple-choice questions from reading, because so many kids associate reading with school and school with pressure and tests. How many of our kids associate reading with pleasure and growth?

The one thing I can promise you is this: if you talk to your kids about decisions like this and explain why you are making them, they get it. They understand. My boys do not play any video games whatsoever, and they seem to be the only ones around them who do not, but they never complain. Really. So far. I promise. I am not delusional. Except for sometimes.

So since summer reading should be reading for pleasure, and because I am giving up on the idea of Battle of the Books, this is what my kids are reading right now—for fun:

Mary (nearly 13):

Heist Society by Ally Carter (and its sequels)

and

Family Tree Book #1: Better to Wish by Ann M. Martin (This totally surprised me. She loved it so much, she wanted to see if the next in the series was out yet. This is out of character for this girl who tends to pick up whatever is lying around, start it and not finish it).

Lucy is reading


for this first time. And she's very confused about how the books line up with the movies. But she'll get over it.

Calvin is reading


The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart and its sequels.

Shaemus is reading

Captain Awesome by Stan Kirby

and

Dinosaur Cove by Rex Stone

and (don't tell him I told you this—a girl detective!)

Cinderella Smith by Stephanie Barden

Flannery is loving sticker books by Roger Priddy right now:

Does anyone out there have any really great sticker books to recommend? Our family is going to a family fiddling camp in a little over a week and Flannery and I are going to have lots of staring time at each other while the others are off making music...

Black Contact Paper

I learned very recently that you can buy black contact paper.

This has been a very exciting discovery, because my life is obviously very limited, but I now have a chalkboard in my house. Right on my kitchen walls.

!!!!!

I was the kind of child who wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. I made up my own bulletin boards and hung them on the walls of my bedroom. My kitchen today is a messy bulletin board full of maps and kids' artwork and random articles, this and that. It helps that my kitchen is forty years old and really hasn't been updated and looks like.... Well, I wouldn't put a panoramic view of my kitchen up on pinterest, let me put it that way. But if I had a fancy kitchen, I might not be confident enough to turn it into a classroom either.

And now my decrepit kitchen has a chalkboard! And I didn't have to buy that really expensive chalkboard paint to make it happen.

Thank you black contact paper.
This first picture shows Mary and Lucy's section of the board. It's great, because every Saturday I just write up everyone's jobs with big boxes for them to check off (it is way more fun to make a check mark on the wall with chalk than on a piece of paper, and I'm not kidding about that). During the week, Mary and Calvin use their parts of the board to record new grammar rules they're learning and favorite sentences. They get ten cents for every word they memorize in their appointed foreign language—that's what those tic marks are on Mary's side. And I use the board to remind the kids of their laundry days and the color of cup they can use that day (because my kids go through cups like they are camels, they are always assigned a cup for the day—that's why Lucy's side says Green... It totally doesn't work, but it's a nice idea.)

And this is how we are keeping track of our Battle of the Books with picture books:

Boy, super fancy, huh! But it will function and that's what's important. I have most of these books books checked out from the library now. We've started to read them. As soon as we have read all the books in a particular bracket, we put a check mark by the title. Kids love to write things in chalk on a board. Even if it's just a check.

This hysterical book is already a favorite and it may just win the whole thing:

Bananas in my Ears by Michael Rosen.

Because we are such a deep family...