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Cutting but not pasting
What are you reading out loud to your child(ren) before bed?
We are plowing through the 8th Little House book, the happy one where Laura falls in love and gets married and Mary returns from a college visit confident and joyful and nothing too devastating happens to the family; no crops devoured by grasshoppers, no trying not to starve to death during a brutal winter.
But perhaps I should amend the above: "we" aren't exactly reading every word; I am "creatively omitting" massive chunks that I deem, on the spur-of-the-moment unsuitable for one of a million reasons: too boring (long descriptive passages of prairies), songs (since I refuse to sing out loud) or just a bit too much for Flipper at her tender young age of 6. Remember poor Laura waking up in the middle of the night with the woman who's house she was staying in holding a massive butcher knife in the air? You don't? Well, Flipper won't either: I skipped all three pages.
Am I the only parent that does this-skips over sentences that I don't like, leaves out words I consider extraneous, censoring content that might make our already-annoying "winding down" period even longer? Trying, at times as much as possible, to avoid topics that might raise questions that will delay the end of the chapter and the clicking off of the lamp? Please tell me I'm not alone!!
I wonder, however, when Flipper can read on her own, if she will ever coming trotting up to me, These Happy Golden Years in her hand, and say, "Did you know there was a BIG KNIFE in here??" Which will be quickly followed by "But you never told me!!!" Can't you hear it now? Because I can. These are the things that keep me up at night, although perhaps not so much as a huge knife kept Laura awake. And, looking for more chapter books that I can stomach reading out loud
(Junie B. Jones does NOT qualify) so toss me some suggestions before Laura and Almanzo head off into the sunset. Knowing me, it will be very, very soon.
Leigh appears Fridays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Leigh on her blog Flipper and Me.
Leigh Sparacino
Leigh is a TriangleMom2Mom featured blogger, appearing every Monday.
Leigh grew up in Durham, attended college in North Carolina, left the area for an island off the coast of Georgia, the high mountains of Colorado, and her favorite mountains in western North Carolina, before returning to the Triangle eight years ago. She lives near Carrboro with her 4.5-year-old daughter Flipper and two dogs. She is single in marital status only, surrounded by friends, family, and her daughter's very involved and loving father. She works part-time and tries to be as involved as possible in her daughter's school, The Emerson Waldorf School, where Flipper is a kindergartner. She likes wood, glass and other natural materials for toys, loves the principles of Waldorf education and hates plastic. She might be the only person in the world with no TV and who hasn't been to a movie in 15 years, but races to the mailbox every Saturday for the most recent issue of People magazine. In other words, a contradiction. Or just human.
Comments
I LOVED reading to my children. When they were infants, I read things like A Christmas Carol and Don Quixote because I figured they didn't know what I was saying anyway.I continued to read to them long after they could read themselves, well into their teens, because we all liked it so much.
I read only the first Little House book because we all thought it was a little boring (except for the part where Papa was "attacked" by the bush that he thought was a bear). Never could get into A Wrinkle in Time, either. There were books from the school's reading list that I discouraged them from reading because really bad things happened to pe0ple (Sounder, Out of the Dust), and I just didn't think they needed to be confronted with that yet.
Books that we loved were all of Roald Dahl's books, The Wizard of Oz (WAY better than the movie), all of the Narnia series (although there were some pretty scary parts).
One of our all-time favorites was Louis Sachar's Holes and Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell. Later, I read them the Harry Potter series and even Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
For safer books, look for some of the favorites from your childhood. Beverly Cleary books still hold up, and with a career spanning 50 years, there are plenty to choose from! How about older books like Cheaper by the Dozen.
I think Anne of Green Gables might be a fun one to read. If I recall, the chapters are not terribly long and the story moves along at a good clip.
Best book I read to my kids EVER...Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. It has some moral questions in there about lying that sparked some very intense and relevant discussions between me and my kids. Also, after reading it, they saw the movie and, for the first time, said, "The book was SO much better than the movie."
I knew then that I had helped to create lifetime readers.
Leigh, we are in the middle of the first Little House book and I am doing the same thing! There have been many sentences, words or sections that I have skipped for various references. There have been a few songs wtih racial references and a few graphic sections (most notably the detailed description of the pig slaughter). In that case, I told her Laurel why I was skipping those pages and explained that they couldn't go buy the pork chops, but had to kill the pig.
Teresa, we LOVED the scene of Pa beating up the bush. My daughter and I were laughing hysterically.
We have really enjoyed reading the American Girl historical fiction books. Each of the time period dolls have six books about their life and the ones we have read are excellent. My daughter really understood how kids lived in that time period. It isn't fluffy - one of the Samantha ones deals with women protesting to earn the right to vote and there are servants in the house. I used alot of these topics as good discussion points.
Di - I LOVED Anne of Green Gables. It's one of the three books I brought from my childhood (along with Shadow Castle and Harriet the Spy). But I can't read the ending without crying, so I couldn't read it out loud. A favorite from our Battle of the Books days was Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare. I would have never guessed I would love it ... a boy surviving in the wilderness, but it was a wonderful surprise.
Wizard of Oz is a good one to read aloud. Sooo much more detail & symbolism in the book than in the movie! And Wake Co Library has a copy of it on CD!