The Death of the Picture Book (and how to give it the jaws of life)

The picture book is dead, or dying anyway. This is according to a NY Times article written in October of 2010.

You can find it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html?_r=3&

There was a major reaction against this article, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Even in this digital age, the picture book is not dead. Kids still love picture books and their relatives still want to buy them.

But the market is shrinking. Both sales of picture books and the amount of picture books being published has gradually declined over the past ten years. That's not the only thing that's shrinking. The word count on the average picture book being published today is close to 500. Not so long ago, that number was closer to 2000. 

1500 words shorter.

Why is this? Is it because our children have shorter attention spans? Is it because parents no longer want to read long books to their children? (maybe...)

Not according to Jed Alexander (artist/illustrator). His blog post here:

http://jedalexander.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-do-picture-books-have-fewer-words.html

basically blames it all on us, as parents. Not for our laziness, but for our ambitions. We want our children to be advanced. We want them to be fantastic readers. We want them to meet all their benchmarks.

I thought of this when my sister-in-law, fabulous mother, concerned about her daughter's reading habits, posted a comment asking if it was okay for her eight-year-old to prefer picture books when she reads to herself. She loves chapter books when my sister-in-law reads aloud to her, but she doesn't enjoy reading them on her own yet, and someone, somewhere is giving my sister-in-law the impression that this is a worrisome thing.

Think about it. My niece is eight years old. She's in second grade. I still read picture books in second grade. You probably read picture books in second grade. There is nothing wrong with reading picture books in second grade. There's nothing wrong with reading picture books in ANY grade. 

What has happened? We are forcing kids younger and younger to read novels and yet we are diminshing the usefulness of picture books by making them only appropriate for preschoolers. We are essentially eliminating an important stepping stone in reading development for children. The longer picture book.

Well, what can we do about? We say as we wring our hands and moan. (Okay, maybe I'm the only one wringing my hands and moaning). 

But the fault lies with us, I'm afraid. Publishers, in general, are answering to what they see are market demands, and as Alexander says, 

We used to have picture books, fully illustrated storybooks, and everything in between. Now by the time kids are in 1st grade they're supposed to abandon picture books altogether. Adults are pushing their kids to read chapter books as soon as they are able. There's no transition point. It's parents at the advice of educators who are doing this, and the picture book market is responding in kind.

And the as the Times article says:

Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.

“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”

Here are some examples of what our kids are missing because of this trend:


 
John Henry
Sam and the Tigers
Tale of the Mandarin Ducks
The Snow Wife
Wind Child
The Fortune-Tellers
The Water of Life
The Kitchen Knight
The Boy Who Drew Cats
Beauty and the Beast
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Tale of the Firebird

These, you will notice, are all folktales or fairytales, or plays on one or the other. Every one of these books is FABULOUS! I love them all. These stories are so important! Stories are the fabric of all cultures around the world, and they matter. They matter to us as human beings, because they represent our history, our world, our lives. They are full of heart and courage and faith and hope. They are full of life. 

But these books have a lot of text, a lot of words. Parents balk. Their first graders should be reading chapter books. Our second graders should not be wasting their time with pictures. 

Read this paragraph from John Henry by Julius Lester:

You have probably never heard of John Henry. Or maybe you heard about him but don't know the ins and outs of his comings and goings. Well, that's why I'm going to tell you about him.

When John Henry was born, birds came from everywhere to see him. The bears and the panthers and the moose and deer and rabbits and squirrels and even a unicorn came out of the woods to see him. And instead of the sun tending to his business and going to bed, it was peeping out from behind the moon's skirts trying to get a glimpse of the new baby.

This paragraph is delicious. This is the funnest book in the world to read aloud, and look at the language! What first or second grader would not see their reading skills improve as they read these words and pour over the fantastic illustrations? 

It's up to us! We have to buy these books for our kids. We have to check them out from libraries. If there were a sudden run on longer folktales with lots of text at the library, the librarians would order more, and when the librarians ordered more, the publishers would notice. Trends would change. Picture books—folktales!—with lots of juicy, rich text would come back into fashion, and the decline of the picture book would reverse. 

Let your kids read picture books—just make sure the very best ones are available to them!

Below is a "Proclamation!" from a group of writers and illustrators devoted to picture books. It may not interest you if you aren't into writing or illustrating, but it is really fabulous. It's a wonderful manifesto to support, and we show that support when we spend our money in support of the best in children's literature.

(If you are having a hard time reading this on my blog, the link to it is here:
http://thepicturebook.co/)

Getting your kids to read to each other

Sometimes my children are so wonderful, they read books to each other without me asking them to.

Sometimes my children are pretty wonderful and they read to each other when I ask them to.

And sometimes my children won't read to each other without serious harassment and threats of other jobs.

Hmm. I don't like threatening when reading is involved (though I am perfectly happy threatening them about other things like chores—I'm especially good about threatening with treats and not following through with my threats. Like giving them treats anyway, even when they haven't done everything as I asked them too. I am consistently inconsistent in this regard... which makes me pretty wonderful too, I suppose).

So the solution to this problem—when they won't read to each other—would just be to not make them read to each other.

But I love it when they read to each other. I love it. They love it. Really. Most of the time. Once they get going.

So sometimes I pay them.

This is probably illegal in some states. I mean, you shouldn't have to pay your children to do a service like that, right? And if you pay them for reading to each other sometimes, will they ever read to each other without getting money?

I do not know the answers to those questions, they are too deep for me, but I've discovered that I am willing to pay my children to do things I think are really, really good for them. Consequences, shmonsequences.

The other day I asked Shaemus (who really needed to do some reading aloud—always worried that kid isn't reading enough) to read aloud to Flannery (who could always use some more read aloud time and will take it from anyone, anytime, anyplace). Sometimes he will do it for fun, but he was in the middle of building himself a rocket ship out of cardboard (something I highly approve of) and didn't want to be interrupted. I knew he would go back to the rocket ship the second he was done, so I wasn't worrying about interrupting his creativity, and Flannery really needed some attention I couldn't give her.

"Two dollars," I told Shaemus. "If you read Flannery fifteen books of your choice (not baby books), you can have two dollars."

And this was the result:
http://youtu.be/QZbqZPGorEQ

Please excuse the quality of this video. I was trying to be sneaky. I didn't want them to know what I was doing, and they didn't until Shaemus's head turned. If you can make it that far in the video, notice when I finally focus in on Flannery's face, how fascinated she is by the story. She doesn't care how imperfectly Shaemus is reading. She is so involved, she can't even suck her finger properly (we're working on that finger sucking—just in case your worried...). And they sat like that, close together, snuggling, reading books, having a great time and not fighting a bit, for well over an hour.

Two dollars well-spent.

(And I will gladly pay for therapy if they have issues later in life.)

Trips and Television

I'm going to issue a challenge today. A presumptuous, opinionated, bossy challenge. It's a television challenge. Whenever I pick up my kids in the carpool line at school, I see televisions on in the cars around me. I'm assuming younger children are already in those cars, or perhaps parents are just getting things primed so when their child pops in the car after a long day at school, they can relax and watch some TV. No need for conversation or a small discussion of their day. A break is already needed for all.

Okay, that was sarcastic. Sorry. But here is my challenge for you: Try turning off the television or video games or iphones in your car. Try it for an entire week—zero screen time while traveling. Try it for your next vacation. No screen time for a good five hour car ride. Bring books on tape. Bring books. Give it a try! I promise you. I PROMISE you, it will be a good experience. I PROMISE you, this experiment is something you will not regret. And I PROMISE you, you and your children can do it.

Let me begin with a miniature history of television in the Eyre household.

I grew up watching a lot of TV. A lot. Sam grew up watching a lot of TV. A lot. When we had our first child, we decided we wanted to limit how much TV she watched. She was limited to the equivalent of one disney movie per day. That's an hour and a half a day of television. I was proud of myself for this accomplishment. Very proud. She wasn't sitting in front of the television all day long, and I tried to make sure what she watched was: (da da da dum!)  "educational."

Then one day I walked into the room (she was watching the educational movie Cinderella) and I saw my child. Her eyes were glazed over. Her stomach was hanging over her diaper (she had nothing else on). Her mouth was slightly open. She looked like a fat, zombie baby whose brains had been removed and replaced with Disney.

This had a profound effect on me, so I decided more limits were in order. Only a half hour of TV per day and it HAD to be educational. PBS educational.

We began watching Between the Lions regularly (or whatever that show is called). I don't know how long this went on, I only know we were living in Maryland for the summer, and I was sitting by Mary watching our educational TV show together (she was two almost three) when I decided to quiz her after the show, just a bit, to see what she had learned.

Oh my goodness.

She had learned nothing. NOTHING. She couldn't recall anything, and it wasn't because she was trying to jet away from me and just didn't want to answer. Nothing from that show—not the letters floating across on clouds, not whatever topic they were teaching—got through to her brain.

I did this several more times with several different shows, all with different results.

At this point in my life, I was getting burned out on television for myself. Sam was watching NBA games every night when he got home. We suddenly had cable (because we were renting someone else's condo), and I was trying to find shows that were truly entertaining, but most of them were just stupid. I was also beginning to feel and understand television's effect on me. Watching television was effecting my ability to concentrate, to do hard mental work.

So I called a moratorium on television. No TV. Anymore. Except for maybe one or two movie nights per week. Sam skeptically agreed.

We have stuck with that ever since, and we love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Haven't missed it for a minute. Not one teeny, tiny, little bitty minute. My kids get an average of two hours a week of screen time of any kind (except for the kids going to school, because they spend time every day playing some sort of computer game).

But just a few months into our moratorium, we decided to drive down to Florida to visit family, and we made a TV exception. We knew we'd have a twelve to fourteen hour drive on our hands with a two-year old and a one-year old, and we thought TV was the only way we would survive the situation. This was before the days of ipads or cheap laptops, so we bought a small television/DVD player for the trip. We went to ridiculous lengths to get the TV plugged into the cigarette lighter and strapped onto something so it wouldn't kill anyone in an accident, and the girls watched twelve straight hours of television on our way down to Florida. They were perfectly quiet. It seemed a dream, and we had television to thank for it. But that was the last time that television (which we still own and occasionally pull out for family movie night) ever went into our car.

Fast forward to our trip down to Florida last week. My father-in-law called while we were in the middle of our long drive home and asked how it could possibly be so quiet. The kids were listening to a book on tape. They were super interested in it, and they were being very, very quiet. My father-in-law asked if we had a television running, and Sam said no, laughing a bit, because his wife (me) would never allow that. And I wouldn't have, because we don't need it.

There's a story I love very much about a fantastic family, the Marjorie and Gordon B. Hinckley family (the family that first introduced to me the idea of a room devoted only to books). Long before the days of televisions small enough to fit inside a car, this family would take long car trips every summer all over the state of Utah. Their mother always read to the family as they drove. On one of these drives, the mother's reading of the final chapter of Where the Red Fern Grows coincided with the family's arrival at an aunt's home in Nevada. Mr. Hinckley had to drive the car around the block several times for the family to gather themselves together and stop crying, they were so moved by the story.

I love that story. I love the image of a parent reading aloud in the car as the family drives and drives and drives.

So here's the question. Just because this technology is available, just because televisions now hang down from the ceilings of our cars, does that mean we need them? That we should use them? That we have to have them? Long ago, children would sit in the car for long car rides and just listen or read or  stare at the window and watch the world pass by. Are they incapable of that now? Or is it us, the parents, that are incapable of that level of patience? Do we want a perfectly quiet car ride, so we numb our children for hours rather than taking that opportunity to expand them? To grow their minds? Do we really think that twelve hours in a child's life is so unimportant we can fill it with nothing just to have a little peace?

These are the books on tape we listened to this vacation in order of greatest success:

Hank the Cowdog the Original Story. It's read by the author, and I cannot tell you how funny this recording is. We were all in hysterics. I thought Calvin would lose a lung, he was laughing so hard. We listened to this twice.

The Great Unexpected by Sharon Creech. They did not want to listen to this. They moaned and complained when I put it in, but, by golly, this is a good story and the moaning quickly turned into, "Hurry up, Mom and put in the next CD!"

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. The narrator of this is incredible. His French accent is divine. This is an odd tale that I happen to love, but the audio version of this transcends the book itself.

Happy listening!!!

Below are the most recent statistics on television watching in America. Read and be horrified.

Total Use of Television Data
Average time spent watching television (U.S.)5:11 hours
Years the average person will have spent watching TV: 9 years
Family Television Statistics 
Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99 %
Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24
Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 65 %
Percentage of Americans that regularly watch television while eating dinner: 67 %
Percentage of Americans who pay for cable TV: 56 %
Number of videos rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million
Percentage of Americans who say they watch too much TV: 49 %
Child Television Statistics
Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,480
Percent of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54 %
Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1,200
Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 150,000
Number of 30 second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 16,000

My Love Follows You Where You Go

There's a song I can't stop listening to right now. I listen to it every chance I get, and every time I do, I cry. So I listen to it again so I can cry some more.

This world seems like an overwhelming place. There's war, pollution, political turmoil, disease, flu, insurance, job insecurities, national insecurities, moral decay, sex abusers, cyber hackers, disabilities, and on and on.

It's easy for me to fret daily over our budget and what our family gets involved in and what we don't. It's easy for me to stress about paying taxes and keeping up the yard and doing enough to help our church and community. If life is hard now, what's it going to be like for our children in just five years, fifteen, twenty?

These fears are so real to me, and I think that's why I love this song, My Love Follows You Where You Go by Alison Krauss.

(Here's a link to a clip of the song:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V7FW9W/ref=dm_mu_dp_trk5 )

My oldest is now twelve, going on thirteen. She will be considered an adult in less than six years. Will I have given her what she needs to survive in just six short years? The strength and courage she needs to push her way through what sometimes seems a dreary world? Right now, she is sick, or she's claiming she is sick, I honestly can't tell—I'm a little skeptical because she seems to have no real symptoms, and other kids have had the stomach flu and I'm afraid she just wants some attention. Some love. She's been begging me to read to her all morning, and I really don't have time. Yet, I'm sitting here, writing this post instead of reading to her, which, sick or not, is what she wants right now to feel my love.

Here are the lyrics to this song about a parent saying goodbye to their growing up child:

More wishes than a thousand hearts can count for you
More smiles than a merry-go-round
The sweetest ending to a bed-time story told
My love follows you where you go

More laughter than a kindergarten out to play
One Sunday morning song that says it all
More summer than a California beach can hold
My love follows you where you go

Future like a promise, you're a city of Gold
Stubborn in your bones and Jesus in your soul
Seeing you stand there, staring at the unknown
I won't pretend that it's not killing me
Watching you walk away slow

Take forgiveness, take a prayer, take the deepest breath
Take the answers in your heart
When you wake up and the world is cruel and cold
My love follows you where you go

Future like a promise, you're a city of Gold
Stubborn in your bones and Jesus in your soul
Seeing you stand there, staring at the unknown
I won't pretend that it's not killing me
Watching you walk away slow

More freedom than a field of flowers in the wind
More beauty than a morning after rain
Up the steepest hill, a dark and crooked road
My love follows you where you go

Future like a promise, you're a city of Gold
Stubborn in your bones and Jesus in your soul
Seeing you stand there, staring at the unknown
I won't pretend that it's not killing me
Watching you walk away slow

One day I will watch her walk away from me, hopefully slowly. Hopefully she won't be running. The walking away won't be forever, but there will be a change. Her future is a promise. She does have a city of Gold ahead if she'll take it. She is stubborn, and I pray with all my heart that Jesus will be deep within her soul. She will most definitely be staring at the unknown, and it will be killing me to watch her go.

Will she know that my love follows her?

In the first stanza is one of the only answers I can give her. "The sweetest ending to a bed-time story told." So much of my time spent with my kids is cajoling, nagging, pushing time. This is important. They need to be cajoled, nagged, and pushed, but reading to my kids should be a time of none of that. It should be a time of love and nothing but love, a shared love, a breath, a blink, the tiniest fraction of time where our souls are united around a good book. That love, I hope, will follow her always.

So I have to stop blogging now and get to it. I have to go read to my twelve-year old so that she knows my love truly follows her wherever she goes.

Our kids need Harry Potter

Last weekend, we drove nine hours to go camping at Disney World. We drove nine hours back yesterday, and, for much of this time, poor Sam had to listen to me read articles about the Common Core on his iphone.

Finally, at one point, he looked at me and said, "You're finding a lot of articles criticizing the core. Perhaps you should find articles for the other side. To balance things out a little."

Well, I didn't look for these articles, because I've already read many of them, but what I did instead, was turn to the core itself. We read over the standards (I've done this many times already), and really, essentially, the standards say, "We want your child to be able to read something, comprehend it, make use of it in his brain, and retell that information to others in a clear, useful format."

The language is so garbled and full of jargon, it is difficult to wade your way through the mire, but truly, that's really all it says. Again and again and again.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Right.

But is this idea new? School districts and states are scrambling to buy new curriculums, new software, new tests to meet these "new" standards. Because there must be a silver bullet, right? There has to be some program out there that will finally help us meet this new, elevated standards that are so good and new. There has to be a program out there that will teach our kids to read.

Let me pause in my sarcasm (sorry, I'm trying not to be cynical), to explain why I pulled my third grader out of school this year.

This is the year they began implementing the Common Core for language arts in our district. In the process, they bought two new programs: Daily CAFE, an organizational program to help the teachers organize reading time, and, The Daily Five.

I went to the third grade Open House. I watched my son's teacher roll her eyes about the new programs. I watched her explain that they didn't really understand how this was going to work, but they were going to do it anyway. I watched her list the steps in the writing process. Prewrite. Write. Rewrite. Peer Edit. Revise. Publish. As if there is a checklist writers of all types go through as we write. "Ah, let's see, prewriting done—check! Writing done—check! Now I will rewrite. Now I will share with my peers. Now I will revise. Now I will publish. Check!" I'm not even sure what the difference is between revising and rewriting. I've never distinguished between the two—and I never heard anyone do so during my two years in a master's program on writing. I listened to her use terms about the learning process I'm not convinced she understood herself because they were vague and a little meaningless.

Our district (and yours too, most likely) is rewriting the rules, rewriting the curriculum, rewriting teaching, rewriting our children's lives.

(Read this article for a great example of the impact this is having on our schools:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicholas-tampio/do-we-need-a-common-core_b_1497854.html  )

I was concerned after this open house, so I paid close attention to Calvin. He came home from school very unhappy each day. He was irritable, and he is my never-irritable child. He didn't have enough time to read about animals, to go outside, he complained. He didn't have enough time to fill his mind with information, which is what Calvin loves to do. Because at school, they weren't filling his mind with information. They were doing Daily CAFE. They were doing The Daily Five. They were giving him the skills he needs to meet this demand:
"We want your child to be able to read something, comprehend it, make use of it in his brain, and retell that information to others in a clear, useful format."

In this search for the silver bullet to meet these new standards, we are forgetting a fundamental part of education. You don't read something, comprehend it, make use of it and then retell it just to do it. It's the information you gain in the process that is important. Reading is a tool. Writing is a tool. These things are used in order to acquire specific information, and, for school children, that information better be interesting and important.

Calvin wants to learn about science. He loves science. So why not give him science with a focus, with a purpose, and in the process fulfill those requirements for the Common Core? I'm not sure, but that's not what is happening.

My darling friend posted a comment on my last post. She told the story of how reading Harry Potter with her third grader turned him into a reader and raised his reading scores in just two months. He is trudging his way through those books not because he wants to become a great reader, but because he wants to find out what is going to happen. He is captivated.

Imagine if he'd only read the part where Harry fights Voldemort at the end because the reading program was trying to teach cause and effect? What if he only read the part where Harry goes to Diagon Alley for the first time because the reading program is trying to teach him how to use adjectives? Would he have fallen in love with Harry Potter if Harry's story were abbreviated, short-changed, stolen from him altogether? Harry Potter is above his level, but he is a boy pushing his way through a difficult reading snowstorm because the destination is so enticing, not because someone is telling him he'd better do it or his test scores will plummet.

In Saffy's Angel, by Hilary McKay, Indigo does not like to read. He's a poor reader until he develops an intense love for polar exploration. He forces himself to read adult books about polar exploration because they are all he can get on the subject, and he cannot quench his thirst. He uses dictionaries and encyclopedias to make sense of what he is reading. He rereads those books again and again until he understands every word, because he loves the subject. Not because he wants to be a great reader. Because he wants to be a polar explorer one day, and books are the best way for him to learn about it.

If your child is struggling with reading in any way, or even if they are supposedly on grade level—who knows what that really means—find them a book they can fall in love with. I promise you, that book exists. You may not think it does, but it does. There are books on every subject you can imagine, old and new. I will help you find them or there are other great blogs that recommend books. One of my favorite books on reading is this:


How to Get Your Child to Love Reading by Esme Codell. The lists in there are awesome. Her ideas are awesome.

It doesn't really matter if the Common Core is good or bad. But it does matter, very desperately, how it is implemented. Schools are taking books away from children in order to fulfill these demands. School libraries are struggling, librarians are being fired and replaced by aides who have no training, but computer programs and Ipads aimed at helping the kids master the core are being bought up indiscriminately.

My friend's son did not need his school district's amazing new reading textbook to improve his scores. He needed Harry Potter.

A Little Bookroom

If you've ever doubted the power of books to save and make a life, read this:

My Father's Books by Luan Starova. 

At the very least, it will motivate you to make books more important in your life. Not just urging your kids to do their reading homework every night, but using books to define your own life, and letting them see that definition every day.

Here is a snippet from another favorite book of mine, a wonderful book of short stories, magical tales, originally published in the early 1900s. It's the introduction written by the author, Eleanor Farjeon, and I think of it every day when I find books EVERYWHERE in our house. In the bathroom. On the floor. On the couches. Under beds. In the room I affectionately call "The dungeon," where the bikes are stored and the dogs sleep (????). This passage from the introduction demonstrates the joyous (if messy) life of a family that loves to read.

"In the home of my childhood there was a room we called ‘The Little Bookroom’. True, every room in the house could have been called a bookroom. Our nurseries upstairs were full of books. Downstairs my father’s study was full of them.  They lined the dining-room walls, and overflowed into my mother’s sitting-room, and up into the bedrooms. It would have been more natural to live without clothes than without books. As unnatural not to read as not to eat.

Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery, there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Mush trash, and more treasure. Riff-raff and gentlefolk and noblemen. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specks dance and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times than those I lived in: worlds filled with poetry and prose and fact and fantasy...

Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted you for something that came to the surface in teh upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable and mentally lost. I was only conscious of the story I was reading, and my heart which was in the story as well." 

There's more to that wonderful introduction, but I will stop there.

Do we want our children to remember our nice, sparkly furniture or our super clean and organized shelves? 

I hope my children can say many things about me when I am gone and they are old. I'm sure they will say I was not a great cook, because I am not. I am terrible. I'm sure they will say I was not the best housekeeper, because I am not. I am terrible. (Sam came downstairs as I was writing this and asked me if I've washed the mattress cover Calvin threw up on last night. "No," I said. "Do you think we have to?" And I was serious. Sam said, that, um, yes. We probably should.) 

But I hope they will say, "Books were everywhere in my home. We ate, drank, and breathed books. Mom wanted us to know about the world, about good and bad, about the lives of others and the lives of incredible, imaginary people. She wanted us to expand our minds and our experiences, every, every minute. So our house was messy. But it was a Little Book-house. And, in the end, we were happy there."

When everything comes together...

Friday, I read aloud to Lucy's fifth grade classroom. They were mesmerized by these two books:


A Weave of Words by Robert San Souci


Lincoln Tells a Joke: How Laughter Saved the President (And the Country) by Kathleen Krull

They were mesmerized. They were mesmerized because A Weave of Words is a terribly exciting story. You have to find out what happens. It is awesome, and after that, they were mesmerized by the Abraham Lincoln book because they all knew that Abe Lincoln was honest, but did they know he was funny? And did they know he was funny and relied on his sense of humor in the most dire of circumstances? They didn't, and they loved finding it out.

It was truly awesome. Every ear in that classroom was glued to the words in those stories, even the ESL girl who came here from China only six months earlier.

That is the power of a good story.

Then fast-forward to Saturday. After a cello lesson, I talked with Lucy's teacher for a moment. He came from a home of seven children, not much money, but chock-full of books. Their dad read them Beowulf  out loud at the dinner table. For fun. And all seven children are brilliant. "Idiot Savants," he told me. Then he bemoaned the future of kids today. "None of my students read," he said. "None of them even own a book! And these are children of educated parents who should know better!" His wife is a high school English teacher and she is no longer allowed to have her children read novels like they used to. They now read passages from things. Non-fiction articles. Maybe one or two novels a year.

Not an hour later I was driving to pick Mary up from a rehearsal, musing on what I'd talked about with our cello teacher, and I heard this story on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/19/169798643/new-reading-standards-aim-to-prep-kids-for-college-but-at-what-cost

Listen to this story. It's not long. Eleven minutes. Or you can read the text. Even if your eyes roll to the back of your head when you hear the words Common Core. Even if you think this is just another passing educational craze. Read this article, because you are wrong. The Common Core is serious stuff, and it is completely changing what happens at school for our kids. (Unless you live in Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska which didn't adopt the Core) And we need to know as parents what this means and what is changing in our schools.

Without question, the core will mean that fewer novels are read in school. There isn't the time anymore, teachers have so much to cover, and the emphasis isn't there, so any state, any school, any teacher serious about adopting the Common Core standards is going to assign fewer whole novels.

What does this mean?

It means that it will become an increasingly rare experience for children to fall into a book, read it from beginning to end, and leave hungry for more, like Lucy's class experienced on Friday.

It means that this must now happen at home if we want our kids to love reading. This reading MUST happen at home.

I say this as a frustrated parent. I homeschool my third grader and he reads upwards of two hundred pages a day of literature, social studies, science. He is reading books from every decade, nonfiction books on every subject, novels of every sort. He reads constantly, and I can see it in his comprehension and his writing and just the way he talks in general.

Then there's my first grader who's in the public schools. I've bemoaned before that he will come home from school having not cracked a book. I know that doesn't mean he doesn't read. I know there are words and sentences all around him all day long at school. But he's still not reading, and when he gets home, he's my least likely to crack a book.

But reading—reading—is different than just decoding and deciphering words. We all know this to be true, so why are we taking this away from kids? Why aren't we encouraging it more at home? How many books are in your shelves at home? How many books do your children own themselves? I went to Walmart today. It is very telling that the number of children's books in that store could fit on one/tenth of an aisle, but the movie/video game/technology section of the store takes up an entire corner. I complained about this to Sam, and he said, "It's demand, honey. If people were buying books, Walmart would have a huge section of books."

We could change that. We really could. If people started buying books with the same vigor they bought video games and movies, what would happen in our country? They are estimating now that about fifty-percent of children graduating from high school this year will have to take at least one remedial course in college to get them ready for freshman level courses.

Let's make sure our children do not fit into that fifty percent.



Even if you listen to this article and you agree with David Coleman

Rewards and Some serious survival

If you teach first grade (possibly in a school in Apex, North Carolina) and you want to reward your students for good behavior, you have some choices.

You can tell them that, because they've been so good, instead of regular morning work every Monday, they can have a special treat, such as doughnuts. Except you can't do that because of sugar. You can tell the kids they can do their homework early so they don't have to take it home, except you can't really do that because even in first grade kids are supposed to have homework every night. You can tell the kids they can go on the computer and play games. You can do that, because technology is educational. You can tell the kids they can watch PBS Kids for half an hour because TV is sort of technology, which is educational...

Or you could say, "You can read! You can read WHATEVER YOU WANT, no matter the level. You can wear pajamas to school. You can bring your favorite (fill in the blank). We can lie on the floor and have a miniature read-a-thon."

You can make reading a reward. What does that say when we make reading a treat, a treasure, a reward?

It says a whole lot about what the adults who are doing the rewarding consider a reward.

What are the rewards in your homes?

In ours, food is a huge reward. For example, right now, if the kids pick up after themselves, they can have cereal in the morning instead of oatmeal. There is probably something damaging in this—they will probably have cereal issues as adults—but it's working! They are picking up after themselves! So the end justifies the means. Right? Right?

Do I make reading a reward?

What about with the things we purchase? Do we say, if you earn this, you can download ten songs off Itunes? Or do we say, if you earn this, you can have three brand new books, straight off Amazon. Hardcover and everything.

If the family accomplishes something great, do you have a giant Friday night read-a-thon? Where everyone gets sleeping bags and pillows and popcorn and you read in groups or read on your own until ten o'clock at night?

We did that once. It was a disaster. There was fighting and very little reading. Everyone went to bed at eight o'clock. Including me and Sam.

This was over a year ago, and we haven't done it since, but I'm thinking we'll try again. Not because I think it will work now because they're older. I'm not sure it will ever "work." But they will get a message I can't give them any other way. That reading is a reward. One of the best rewards. And it's a family affair, worth popcorn and sleeping bags and mess.

If I don't do this, my children are going to think the best reward in the world is cereal or PBS Kids. And it's not. It's really, truly (really, truly!) not.

Onto some book recommendations...

If your middle grade boy (child) likes these:

And you want them to branch out to something just as exciting, just as full of adventure and the wild, but perhaps a little better written...

Give these a try—


Dogs of Winter by Debbie Pryon


Wild Life by Cynthia DeFelice (Calvin really loved this one—quick read, but so well done)


Legend of the Ghost Dog by Elizabeth Cody Kimmell

And if you or your child has not read this,


Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner

Please fix that right now. Everyone should read this book. I envy the person who gets to read this book for the first time. Read Stone Fox this weekend during your giant family read-a-thon because the house is clean or they did a great job on the chores that week or just because. Just, just because.

Expanding

These picture books will expand you and your children. They will make you think. You will finish the book in a different place from when you began.

You will never be the same. I hope. Please give them a try!

Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford



Little Bird by Germano Zullo



Abe Lincoln's Dream by Lane Smith



House Held Up By Trees by Ted Kooser


Jimmy the Greatest! by Jairo Buitrago



The Emily Sonnets: The Life of Emily Dickinson




And this is not a picture book. It's a YA Biography of the Bronte sisters, but I found it truly fascinating. If you love Jane Eyre (I do) or Wuthering Heights (I do not), you will definitely find this interesting, and it was such a quick read, I read it in a night.

The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne by Catherine Reef