Since potty training, my husband has been joking that the next milestone to look forward to is college but for me it’s been getting Chicken Little’s attention span long enough to read chapter books together.
He’s never been that interested in books. He enjoys being read to when I make him sit down and listen to a story but it’s not his first choice of things to do.
For me, however, books were my saving grace. I knew how to read long before I started school. Once I had mastered my letters individually I spent painstaking hours sounding out each letter, using both hands to cover up the words on either side of the one in question so they wouldn’t distract me, and closing one eye so I could really concentrate.
They were hymn books mostly. We spent summers playing in a park that bordered a church. I would sneak in to escape the heat and hide in the back row with the books.
By the second grade I was reading adult non-fiction and my mother bought me undereye concealer so the teacher would stop asking about my sleep habits. You see, I am a bit compulsive and have always had a hard time stopping something until I have completed it. I would frequently stay up past midnight reading. It was a bit of a disappointment to me then that Chicken Little didn’t share my love of books.
For some reason this week I decided that I really wanted to begin reading chapter books to him. I bought a copy of James and the Giant Peach. I also saw a series called “The Magic Treehouse” which was very short, organized in brief chapters, and had an illustration on just about every other page. The subject matter was things like dinosaurs and pirates. If anything was going to get him interested in chapter books that was the stuff.
We started that night on the dinosaur one. He eagerly looked at all the illustrations and waiting anxiously for Toddler to take a nap so I could read to him. At first he found it difficult to sit through the paragraphs of text with only one illustration to look at. He wriggled a lot and I could tell his mind was moving on to other things. But he stuck it out. We made it halfway through before Toddler woke up. At bedtime that was his book of choice. It was much easier for him this time and he lay quietly while we finished the book. When it was done he told me, “Mama, I just love it. Can we read another one?”
So the next day we started on James and the Giant Peach, which is substantially longer and has fewer illustrations. I read it aloud to him while he worked on an art project. I read it dramatically. When I read the part of the strange man who gives James the magic bag I made my voice creak and leaned in to him. Apparently it was too realistic because he implored me not to read like that anymore. But I could tell it got him hooked.
We read 42 pages that day and he is waiting anxiously for the chance to continue it. I could not be happier. I know we’ll have challenges in the years ahead as we transition from parent reading to self-reading but I can’t help but think if I get him hooked on the adventure and unlimited fantasies that books can create now it will only serve to motivate him. Sort of the same way he potty trained because he felt that his superhero underwear helped him to run faster and jump higher. Whatever works, right?