Sydney is eight and loves to read. Among her favorite stories and ones called Fancy Nancy. Her school required her to read to someone for 15 minutes every night. She is a very obedient child and would read longer. When she was reading to me at the story's end are a list ofwords. One was select, a fancy word for pick. We went on to talk about other words that could be used for pick. Choose was the first one. Then I told her she opted for the book. She loved that word and that was the first thing she said to her parents when they arrived to pick her up. The other night she didn't want to read the book from the school lobrary so we picked up The Henge Betrayed -- Flight and she read from that. When she encountered a word she didn't know she stopped and we discussed what it meant. I will definitely encourage this child's love of words and perhaps foster a writer.
Now we come to her younger brother and sister. The pair are also from China and are learning the language word by word. Reading to them is interesting and challenging to help them gain language. We have read the same books now five times. What I've seen is now when we come to the pictures they can tell me what the animals or places are. They are also learning how to count and their alphabet letters with the books I've chosen.
Last night at a talk about books I met a woman who has a number of grandchildren from the ages of four to eighteen and they all read She was upset because the older children would rather read their books on the computer rather than hold them and feel the paper. We talked about this for a time and hopefully I convinced her the reading was more important than the medium. That's what I've discovered. Reading counts more than the medium.
Lovely post. I can picture you now, snuggled with your grandchildren, reading a good book. Good for you.
ReplyDeleteI agree that as long as they're reading it doesn't matter whether it's an eBook or print. Just read.