By designating some school days as ‘Reading Day’, that’s how. A proper book whore can’t be made without allowing her to veg out in front of a book for an entire school day. Thankfully our school days are often shorter than the average day for a kid in the system so we’re not totally being lazy.
I’ve always been under the strange impression that everyone loved to read as much as I do. When my eldest learned to read she devoured books quickly and in my mind, that was normal. At twelve, she reads faster than I do (as in, I read 500 wpm* and she’s faster, with great comprehension – *not reading Charles Dickens, nor Chic-lit).
When my next daughter was born, I wrongly assumed that the second she could comprehend books, she’d be snagged in as my eldest and I were. I couldn’t be more wrong, and I think I may have pushed her away from being a book whore early on because of it.
This is her 5 minutes ago.
She was the first to cheer when I told them today was a reading day. We finally figured out that her brain, and truthfully her interests, are less easy to please. She can’t just read any and everything. It must truly interest her.
What a freaking concept. Seriously, as a bonfire whore, I read anything. I’ve read soft-porn, sci-fi, historical fiction, mystery, fantasy, youth fiction & non-fiction, biography, Christian fiction, romance, how-to, history, self-help, other religion, horror, banned and of course knitting books.
We scoured the library book shelves to find books that appealed to her and failed much much more than we succeeded. It was frustrating for me to not be able to share this obsession, ummm, love of books with her. I wanted her to be able to use her incredibly vivid imagination to immerse herself into a story as deep as she does her art.
What I didn’t take into consideration was a couple of things. That, 1)like her father, reading doesn’t come super easy to her, nor very fast. In an effort for me to get her to read more we were heading to the library once a week because my eldest and I would be out of books by then. While we had armfuls of giant tomes, she’d step up with the bare minimum. And b) she’s only 10. What a strange thing for me to forget, but because she’s so tall and quite mature for her age, I mistakenly believed that every kid under the age of 10 reads voraciously. That’s wrong, wrong of me to assume so and wrong of me to push that assumption on my daughter.
What I ended up doing was letting go of the control. It was stupid of me to think I should control what she reads as it just lead to head butting. So I cut her some slack and told her that although I require at least 2 non-fiction books in her load when we go, she does not have to finish every book she takes just because she’s borrowed it from the library. That took some pressure off of her. It also gave her to opportunity to find out herself a little bit more about what she’d be into reading. She’d start by bringing home smaller books, like Arthur, or Two-of-a-Kind (Olsen twins), and Captain Underpants. She’d open each, peruse a few pages and quickly decide if she’d even finish or if it was too boring. She also attempted Harry Potter and put it down. Not out of boredom per se, but because a good number of the words were made up (spells, places, etc), she had trouble comprehending because her brain would be stuck on a term she didn’t know how to say or understand (expelliarmus anyone?). She put down a lot of books in that time, and I could see the frustration on her face. It wasn’t until she found the Archie comics that something clicked. She is a huge visual learner, with a bit of kinetic in there for fun, and to see pictures displaying out the story had her actually devouring books. In my school, comics always count. It’s still reading and no one can tell me different. It was then that I showed her that the youth section of our library has a Graphic Novel section. Graphic novels are slightly different than comics in that they are books in graphic form rather than shorter story lines changing from page to page. The typical comic is about 30 pages, whereas a graphic novel can be from 150 to over 500 pages.
She inhaled those books insanely. I think she went through half the shelves in no time. She did find a few that we’re boring (and no, the Twilight graphic novel wasn’t one of them, she enjoyed that one) but most were read to the point of me telling her to actually put a book down to do something.
So we made it, she developed into a whore without me even noticing and now she’s reading large books she wouldn’t even pick up before. Time was all she needed, and a good writer to keep her occupied. Maybe in fututre I’ll even get her to read the Harry Potter series, or even The Hobbit. But for now, we read for school, and she can turn herself into the whore she’s bound to be when she’s ready to.
). Although this isn’t technically my trip, I have a bit of pressure with my maternal grandparents for whom my mom is the major contact for – that job often then falls to me.
