The benefits of children reading to each other

Dear Aunt Debbie,

As Eleanor's independent reading is progressing (and she's going like a house afire!), we're starting to enjoy some of the benefits of our kids reading to us, and to each other.

Benefit #1: Eleanor finds new authors and series she's really into.  In her classroom, Eleanor "shops for books" once a week, choosing five independent reading books at her level and bringing them back and forth to school every day.  Lately, she's been choosing multiple books by the same author, really paying attention to who's writing what she likes to read. This is how we've gotten a lot of Syd Hoff books into the house: Sammy the Seal, Danny and the Dinosaur, Mrs. Brice's Mice. She loves the cartoony drawings, and the general sense of play throughout Hoff's stories. They're a little meandering, and fun.  Henry and Mudge, who you blogged about a while back, have also become huge favorites here -- the third series by Cynthia Rylant that we've fallen in love with, after Poppleton and The High Rise Private Eyes.  Watching her gain a conscious appreciation for the work of a particular author is a joy.

Benefit #2: Eleanor reads Isabel the crappy books I don't want to read to either of them.  As I'm home with Will full time right now, and Isabel is home with us three days a week, we're going to the library a lot. Isabel's library book picking habits are fairly indiscriminate: she stops in front of a shelf and just pulls out whatever's there, barely looking at it until we sit down to read it there or later.  What she gets most excited about are books she knows, or books with pop culture characters she recognizes.  Each visit, she picks up at least one badly-written series book: a Star Wars industry story, or a godawful Disney princess book, something either cloying or nonsensical in its narrative, and sometimes both.  Then, of course, this is the book she wants me to read to her sixteen times in the next two days.  Imagine my joy when I peeked around the corner of the kitchen into the living room a few days ago and saw Eleanor reading Isabel Rapunzel and the Golden Rule/Jasmine and the Two Tigers!  They were both totally into it, and I didn't have to be involved.

Benefit # 3: Both girls have started reading board books to Will. At three months old, Will is starting to be entertainable at times, and he's really paying attention to his two older sisters.   Among other games (painting his hands and feet with dry paintbrushes, dancing around him, putting hats on his head), they're showing him books. Eleanor caught his attention first with Pat the Bunny, that wonderful old standby with things to touch on every page. It's such an odd, pleasing, dated little book.  The next day, there was Isabel showing him My Friends, by Taro Gomi, a gentle recitation of all the things a little girl learns from the animal kingdom:

I learned to climb from my friend the monkey.

I learned to run from my friend the horse.

I learned to march from my friend the rooster.

I learned to nap from my friend the crocodile.

While all this kid reading has been going on, I've managed to find time to read Fire, Kristin Cashore's second book.  I'm in total agreement with you -- it's not nearly as good as Graceling.  Turns out that skipping it and going straight to Bitterblue was a good idea.

Love, Annie

Hole-y books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I remember discovering The Far Side at Grandma and Grandpa's apartment, right next to the Doonesburys.  Total magic, especially once I got old enough to really get the sly humor.  I don't know when or how we all got hooked on Calvin and Hobbes, but I have vivid audio memory of Michael dissolving in fits of giggles as he read them.  Good stuff.

It's interesting to see the ways in which Isabel's reading habits are similar to, and different from, Eleanor's at her age.  Some of the same books are total hits, and some that were Eleanor's favorites leave Isabel cold.  Isabel is far harder on the physical books than Eleanor was (with the exception of our chewed-up Goodnight Moon board book) -- we now have a number of picture books with ripped pages, from Isabel's active page-turning.  Violet the Pilot has had the most egregious damage, i.e. the most love.  Part of this comes from Isabel being left on her own with books more often than Eleanor was: if I'm trying to read a chapter of a longer book to Eleanor, I'll leave Isabel alone flipping pages, rather than rushing over to be part of her reading and to spare the book some wear and tear.  But I think Isabel is also a very tactile reader.  She likes books with flaps to lift and tabs to push and pull.  And she, as Eleanor also did at her age, likes books with holes in them.

You and I, and then you again, have written about Janet and Allan Ahlberg's marvelous Peek-a-boo!  The holes cut into the pages, showing what the baby sees and then enlarging to show the whole scene, are a great size for putting fingers into, and even entire small hands. 

Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar has much smaller holes, holes the size of the caterpillar as he eats his way through ascending amounts of food (mostly fruit, but then a carnival's worth of delicious junk on Saturday, and penance in the form of a "nice green leaf" on Sunday).  It's such a great book: brightly colored, funny, good for counting, with pages of varying sizes and all those wonderful holes.  I remember Eleanor finding it hysterical when I'd press my finger up against the back of a page to touch her finger on the front of the same page through the hole.  Jeff and I continue to be mildly disturbed by the fact that the wings on Carle's butterfly appear to be upside down:

 Aside from this, however, it's a great little book.

Less known, but no less tactile, is  Lois Ehlert's Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On.  It begins:

If I could put on a suit of scales

Add some fins, and one of these tails

I'd close my eyes, and then I'd wish

That I'd turn into a beautiful fish!

The narrator goes on to imagine what she'd see through her fish eyes: ascending numbers of different kinds of fish, all with little punched-out holes for eyes, so that the color on the next page comes through.  Again, much fun with small fingers and flesh-colored fish eyes appearing and disappearing.  There's also an almost-invisible dark little fish at the bottom right of each right-hand page, intimating what the next number will be.

Finally, a classic: Dorothy Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny, first published in 1940.  I remember playing obsessively with our copy as a kid: touching "Daddy's scratchy face" (the patch of Daddy's skin made, literally, of sandpaper), looking into the shiny mirror, and putting my finger through "Mummy's ring" (the hole in the book!).  It's one of the most pleasing tactile books I know of, and also one of the easiest to destroy, with its flimsy plastic ring binding.  But totally worth getting a second copy when that happens.

Love, Annie