Raising a Reader...I Finally Got It Right!

I’ve been a lover of literature for as long as I can remember. My first memory is begging my mom to read “Hand, hand, fingers, thumb”, a Dr. Seuss book, at the age of 3 or 4. I still have the book. Then there was another Seuss favorite “In a People House”.

I didn’t read too much during elementary school but during junior high I began again. Perhaps, it was Mrs. Ramsey, my 8th grade Language Arts teacher that helped. She assigned a project of writing and illustrating a book for our schools library with a partner. My partner was Anne Vasquez, and our book was the “The Beautiful Unicorn”. I’ve often wondered how long the book lasted, not been bound by a machine. Should I go back to my old school and see, if maybe, just maybe it hadn’t been thrown away? That would be a long shot!

Well, like I’ve stated, I’ve always been a lover of books and so, I only assumed that my children would as well. NOT! I still have several of my own childhood books and over the course of 20 years I’ve purchased hundreds for them. I even set up a library for them after re-assigning a room that was supposed to be used for formal dining (yes, my dining room). With four children there wasn’t much “formalness” at dinner time in my house. So I went out and purchased white book shelves, which lined two of the four walls. I even divided the books by subject. There was a shelf for science (animals, weather, and experiments), geography and social studies, multi-cultural books were divided by race or culture. There were my resource books for helping them study and learn (Resources had a bookshelf all to themselves). The Magic School bus books were divided from the Magic Tree House books and so on and so forth. I had posters that taught phonics, time, Spanish and continents and two computers with a shared printer. I tried so hard to excite them about reading, I read all the time! I propped my books up on the kitchen counter as I cooked, read patiently as I waited for trains to pass when we were out, and it’s a must before bedtime to read if only but a page or two before falling off to sleep. None of that worked with my first three children.

By child four I was determined to have at least 1 reader! I read to him each night while he was still in my womb, even before I knew his gender. I played Mozart, like they suggest we do. I recited the alphabet and numbers.

It worked!!! I finally, after birthing four babies have produced a reader. He is so much so that threatening a time out doesn’t work but he will burst out in tears and scream bloody murder if I dare say to him that “we won’t read”, that night before bed. Reading is his candy treat.

I finally got it right…