Dear Bibliophile, is a weekly blog that is published (mostly, but not exclusively) by SARA’s Secretary Hannah Davis. The blog will include announcements related to SARA’s goings-on in the community, education resources, childhood development information and community resources. Interested readers are welcome to write in with questions or letters to SARA using the info email listed on the website and including “Dear SARA” in the subject line. Some blog posts may serve as responses to these letters. Book recommendations are also not excluded. Reading this blog could make a love of literature closer than it appears.
Dear SARA,
My son is in the third grade and his teacher has told me that he needs to start reading more, otherwise he will not pass the grade. My son has a lot of extracurriculars though and doesn’t have a lot of free time to be doing extra homework. He doesn’t have extra time to read books that aren’t required in classes. How can I make sure that my son passes the grade with his time constraints?
Sincerely,
A Concerned Soccer Mom
Dear Bibliophile,
The answer is not complicated, which is to say that it is simple, but it is not easy. It sounds like your son is struggling with reading and the only way to get better at reading is, well, to read.
Think of it this way: if your son’s coach told him that he was too slow of a runner and therefore will be benched for the next soccer game, then the logical solution to ensure that he would get to play in the next game would be to have him practice running faster so that he could get faster.
Simple, no?
Let me put it another way.
Reading is not “extra”. It is the basis of human expression, understanding, and basic articulation of the world around us. Steven Pinker, a renowned linguist and anthropologist, argues that humans are so attuned to language development that children in remote populations (more remote than rural TN even!) who are not exposed to formal literacy education will formulate their own languages, even going so far as to create the dreaded grammar rules. Pinker takes this observation further to show readers who are willing to follow him down the linguistic-appreciation-rabbit hole that the building blocks of language are in fact foundationally similar to our own DNA.
Now, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch for some to believe, but what I can say is that there have been countless studies to prove Pinker right in stating (if indirectly) that reading matters.
It matters a lot:
Now, I know what you might be thinking: My son reads at school, doesn’t he?
But the fact is that most of the reading completed in classrooms, especially public education classrooms, is not sustained reading (reading that is uninterrupted for a longer duration). Sustained reading is where students essentially get the most bang for their buck. This is, to put it in sports terms, your intensive conditioning session. This is practice, and you wouldn’t have your son miss practice, would you?
This letter could go on for pages and pages and really demands a tomb of reasons and habits to assist in creating a habit for your son to read on his own. But you are a busy woman, and you are living a busy life, so I will try to condense my suggestions into a list that can easily fit on a 3×5 flashcard (a bite-sized bit of reading, so to speak).
- Make the time: even if it is five minutes a day, it will benefit your son.
- Find books that interest him. As Toni Morrison said, “If there is a book that doesn’t exist on the shelf that you want to read, you should write it.” And though I’m not expecting your son to follow this advice (unless of course he does want to write creatively, in which case, please check back for more creative writing tips) I can speak from experience and say that many writers have followed her advice. There is a book out there about anything and everything. Find what he loves.
- Children learn by example. If he sees you on your phone instead of reading, then he will feel less inclined to read on his own. If you make reading a part of his daily routine (much like brushing his teeth or taking a shower) then he won’t question it.
- Ask him to read in small bits (menus, movie descriptions, posters and billboards). Reading is not apart from our daily lives, but in fact constructs and informs everything we do. Once he sees this, he will understand that reading simply makes his world bigger.
Sincerely,
SARA
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