Turning Kids Into Readers: Seven Tips I Never Learned from Schools

I knew having three kids would make me a more humble parent, I just didn’t realize how much more humble!

When it comes to reading, each of our kids has taken a different path.  We have one who was a natural reader.  He would have loved reading no matter what we did as parents.  If we’d only had him, I wouldn’t be writing this post.  Instead I’d be thinking, “What’s the big deal with teaching kids to love reading?  It just happens.”

Our two other kids have required a more active parental campaign in order to learn to love reading.  Much trial and error and, hence, lots of learning on our parental parts.

What I’ve learned:

1.  I can’t read aloud to a child at bedtime. I become too mind-numbingly tired and exhaust all my energy fighting sleep.  It’s just not worth it.  For the first 4 or 5 years of parenthood, I felt exceedingly guilty when I heard other parents talk about bedtime reading with their kids.  Thankfully I’ve moved past this.  Now I read to my kids after school, on weekends, holidays, or sick days.

2.  Reading aloud creates a shared memory. Especially when I do the hard work of finding a book we’ll both enjoy, reading aloud has become one of my favorite parenting activities.  I’ve noticed that we talk about certain books we’ve read together again and again, the way we might fondly recall an enjoyable vacation experience.

3.  Let the child do what he needs to in order to focus on the story. With my son Daniel, the cozy image of me reading with him snuggled beside me was the first thing I had to let go of.  He’s a ball of energy, and with him reading aloud works best after a strong dose of exercise. Then, before we begin reading, Daniel chooses something to keep his hands occupied (a floor puzzle, Rubik’s cube, cards) some quiet activity which doesn’t require too much concentration.  Even though this may seem like a song and dance merely to read a book together, it’s exceedingly superior to the wiggly, unfocused alternative.

I recently read an article with the subheading, “Fidgeting may enable children with ADHD to stay alert.”  It stated that all the children in this particular study fidgeted when remembering and manipulating computer-generated letters, numbers, and shapes.  However, the children with ADHD wiggled even more.  As far as I can tell Daniel does not have ADHD, but it was reaffirming to know that I don’t have the only super-squirmy boy.

4.  Use characters from your kids’ books to help you better understand your kids. This is an old child psychotherapy trick. You may have noticed that past a certain age, kids dislike talking about themselves.  Yet they’re usually willing to tell you something about their friends.  So ask them “what Amelia would do in this situation” or “what Ben’s opinion of something is” and you are likely to hear indirectly about your child’s views.

Back to books… This strategy can also be used with characters in books.  While reading aloud or talking about your child’s current book, ask for details about her favorite characters.  What does she like about these characters?  What does she think a character would do or feel in various circumstances?  You get the idea.

5.  Don’t purchase video games until a solid love of reading has been established. This rule was enacted mostly for our dear Daniel who would likely trade his left leg for the chance to play 2-3 hours of daily video games.  I haven’t actually seen this happen (the game playing marathon) but Todd and I know it’s true.  Parental intuition.  It’s been hard to hold the line on video games, but not having them in the house has definitely allowed Daniel to focus more on reading.  I’m not exactly sure how to determine when “a love of reading has been established” but I’ll know it when I see it.  We are slowly getting closer.

A study at Carnegie Mellon found that even average 8-12 year-old readers had stronger white matter connections in the brain area called the anterior left centrum semiovale than poor readers.  However, when poor readers in the study were given six months of intensive instruction, their white matter connections improved significantly.

6.  Do what you need to in order to hook a child into a book. Unlike our son who loves reading anything and everything, our second two children often have a tough time getting into a book.  If I am quite sure the book is a good fit for the child, I often read the first chapter aloud to them.  Then they read the rest of the book on their own.  Or if the book is slightly above their ability level, I’ll sometimes buy an audio version for them to listen to first.  Then later they read the book unaccompanied.

I also periodically encourage confidence boosters.  When Daniel is struggling through a challenging book, I’ll have him put it aside and instead open an old favorite.  It was at one of these moments that I realized Geronimo Stilton would be part of my life for so much longer than I ever wished or hoped for!

7.  Reading really does improve writing. Okay, I have heard teachers say this before but I never completely understood it until recently.  While reading one of Stephen’s school essays this year, I finally saw how reading enhances writing.  He wrote about coring trees at science club and his essay included the sentence, “The tree was in a group of similar Cottonwoods, most of which were now succumbing to the forces of Fall.”  I mean, we just don’t speak this way in our home.  Alas, would that we did.  And I know they don’t talk that way at school!

Stephen must have picked up this language from a book. Although he’s only in 6^th grade and his writing is still evolving, I love that he has a huge store of ideas and techniques from his reading to inspire his writing.   Between this and improving my brain’s white matter connections, it’s enough to encourage me to read more!

I’d love to hear other people’s tips for creating readers!

____

Recommended Reading:

Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan.  Third through seventh grade girls would love this one.  This is a story about a girl from a wealthy Mexican family.  When she is 13, her father is killed and her life changes drastically.  Now poor, her small family immigrates to California and they become migrant workers.  This book is fiction, though based on the life of the author’s grandmother.  I read this aloud to my kids and we all loved it, though some parts were pretty sad.

The Circuit, by Francisco Jiménez.  Try this one especially with third though seventh grade boys.  This is an autobiography by a man who is now a college professor in California.  His family immigrated to America from Mexico when he was a young child.  They too were migrant workers in California, following a circuit of fruit and vegetable picking from year to year.

I recently read this aloud to Daniel, though Stephen and Annie also listened at times.  Daniel really connected with the main character and it helped him to understand the importance of family over possessions.  The story only follows the main character through age 14, so Daniel and I looked the author up on YouTube because Daniel desperately wanted to know how things turned out for him in the end.

Spanish Immersion in Costa Rica: Unexpected Highpoints for My Kids

If you read last week’s post about our family’s experience learning Spanish in Costa Rica for a month, you no doubt got the impression that it was a fairly trying adventure, but an adventure nonetheless!

My summary at the time of this type of travel with children was:

On the one hand it is incredibly taxing to travel in this way with 3 kids.  Each of us is our own sherpa, carrying our daily needs in our backpack as we walk and bus everywhere.  The days we forget to bring our additional bag stuffed with raingear we’re quickly punished with one of the frequent downpours.

But traveling like this is also a wonderful way to meet people!  We have met so many Costa Ricans (Ticos) through our kids asking their kids to play.  People here love children and are more willing to talk with us, I think, because the kids are with us.

A man came up yesterday, said hello, then mentioned that he sees us out walking each day with our kids.  Daily, people approach Annie, say something like “muchacha” or “linda” and squeeze her chubby cheeks.  She’s actually been quite good about this and just smiles back.  Since there are not many American families in this town, people are definitely getting to know us.  Today as we walked to Spanish school, a bus driver going the other direction honked and waved hello.  We’d taken his bus last week.

We rewarded ourselves for completing 3 weeks of Spanish school by traveling to what we referred to as the other Costa Rica.  We visited the rainforest and observed probably 20 different types of animals, most memorably the White-faced Capuchin monkeys who played together like children in the broad-leafed trees directly above us.  Our entire family ziplined through the Cloud Forest.  And we visited a bubbling, gurgling volcano. Totally cool.

The kids loved these experiences as did we, and many amazing photos were taken.  But these times didn’t turn out to be the parts of this trip our family still talks about regularly.  Instead, our most frequent Costa Rican conversations center on the weird and unexpected experiences we tended to have on the local buses.

To give you a visual, here’s my description from week 3:

We’ve totally gotten the hang of the local buses now.  As some of you know they are old American school buses, though painted all different colors, not merely yellow.  In the afternoons that we don’t play futbol at the park, we often take a bus to explore a nearby town.  The first time we did this, I feared we wouldn’t know when we’d arrived and where to get off.  However, I now know not to worry.  Simply wait until you see the big Catholic Church with the town square right across the street, and get off there.

We had so many slightly stressful, surprising, and/or funny experiences on buses in Costa Rica.  These are what Stephen, Daniel, and Annie love to reminisce about to this day!

Once we were riding on a crowded bus and were packed in beside the back door, which the whole time never closed.  I clung to Daniel who was a little too excited about the rapidly passing scenery.  Or the time our family group became divided and only one part could wedge their way through the congested bus aisle and out the back door when our stop came.  Another time the only available seat left on the bus didn’t possess a cushion, just a hole in a metal frame.  Daniel willingly sat there.

But probably the most popular bus story is one about me.  We’d had a long day exploring a new town and had been waiting a while at one of the dirtier, busier bus stations I’d ever experienced.  There was an unhealthy odor coming from somewhere nearby.  Being in a foreign country we were never sure if we were standing in the correct spot or which bus was ours.

By the time we stepped on to our bus, a humid darkness had descended.  Our driver climbed surprisingly speedily up a steep, winding hill toward the area in which our hotel was located.  Todd and I carefully scanned the surroundings so we wouldn’t pass by our somewhat unfamiliar lodging, when suddenly the bus did indeed drive right by it!

I won’t say I panicked.  What would you call just below panic, hypo-panic maybe?  That was me.  I found myself banging on the dusty bus window while loudly pleading, “Para! Para!” (meaning Stop!)  See, if I was fully panicking I would have yelled in English.  The generally low-key Costa Rican women on board all paused their conversations to stare at me.

Then the bus driver halted the bus, at a regular stop.  It turned out our stop was just past our hotel, not before it.  Not my best moment.  However the kids love this story and retell it with zeal perhaps monthly!

Our time learning Spanish in Costa Rica was both a difficult and incredibly enriching experience.  Annie, Daniel, and Stephen lived and ate with a family from another culture for 3 weeks, which Stephen later said felt like a year.  (I actually consider this a positive thing.  I’m not sure he did.)  Being in Costa Rica led us into a myriad of conversations we wouldn’t otherwise have had with the kids:

“What are the advantages of having one’s waste water system below ground versus above ground?”

“Mama, did you notice that not all the kids have bikes here like they do at home?”

“Why would Costa Rica choose not to fund a military?”

Here was my final email home from Costa Rica:

We are on our last day of this adventure, and as all parents of young children will understand, I feel the desperate need for a vacation.  How I would love to visit one of those beautiful spa or yoga retreats one hears about in exotic places, like Costa Rica perhaps.

Our family did in fact take a similar trip the next summer. This trip, to Guatemala, turned out to be even more challenging than the first one.  Read about it in here two weeks from now.

Have you taken any trips like this one with your family?  Leave a comment below!

Learning Spanish as a Family in Costa Rica

Two summers ago our family traveled to central Costa Rica for a month to live with a local family and learn Spanish at a language school.  Our kids were 11, 9 and 6 at the time.

I’d conceived of the notion of learning Spanish as a family and thought we should do it during the summers when Todd, being a professor, has some time flexibility.  I loved the idea of becoming fluent in a second language, while showing our kids different cultures.  But, we didn’t just want Spanish by the beach, margaritas in hand.  We wanted more of an immersion experience.

Todd and I had taken 5 months of intensive Spanish before we set off.  Our sons had taken a year-long, after-school Spanish class, and Annie had merely listened to Spanish CDs and watched Muzzy, the BBC kids’ language program.  So you can see, we had a lot to learn.

As with all grand plans, this one looked much easier on paper than it was “up close and personal.”  I am writing about it now with the perspective of time, but want to use a smattering of my emails from the trip to underscore the intensity and vibrancy of the experience.

Here was my first email home:

I don’t have a ton of time, but I wanted to jot down some first impressions of our Costa Rican experience.  First, I’m so glad we spent the time and energy on all those Spanish classes last summer and fall because, contrary to what many Americans told us, we are not running into many English speakers here.  This is likely because we are off the tourist path, at least while we attend Spanish language school.

Our homestay mother does not speak any English, the bus drivers don’t speak English, our Spanish teacher doesn’t speak English.  Our new friends we met at the local park when we asked them to play frisbee, don’t speak English.  We are immersed in another culture!

This of course is what I wanted and hoped for in this trip.  However, I’d like to clarify that taking 4 hours of Spanish every morning, speaking Spanish at home and out and about, attempting to order food for 5 that will be eaten, and making sure the kids don’t get mown down by a car while crossing the hectic streets is not a vacation.  It’s an adventure, but not what one would call relaxing.

That first week was pure survival.  Some things we learned:

1. Don’t just go for one week or you’ll never exit survival mode.
2. Maintain low expectations and offer the family frequent treats during that first week.
3. Let the kids watch some tv, at least it’s in Spanish.

Here’s what I wrote about our Spanish language learning after week 2:

Todd and I are definitely learning more Spanish and have ample opportunity to practice it.  For those of you who know Spanish already, we are currently swimming in a deep pool of the subjunctive tense and will be in these waters for a while.  But it’s been so helpful to study and practice with a partner.

As for our kids learning Spanish, the jury is still out.  Todd and I have contemplated this and have generated a hypothesis.  Numerous people told us the kids would learn Spanish in no time if they traveled to a Spanish-speaking country and spent time with local kids.  We are now assuming the definition of “no time” is one year.   To be honest, this feels like less of a surprise to me than to Todd.  He’s always been an optimistic soul.

My hope was to come down here and show the kids a very different culture than their own.  I wanted them to know that not all places are like Boulder.  Then I wanted them to have contacts with kids their ages from another culture, to get an up close sense of the differences.   I also wanted them to understand personally how hard it is for people who immigrate to our country.  I hoped that experiencing these things would then give the kids a motivation for learning Spanish they didn’t have before.  Then, it was icing on the cake for me if the kids learned a ton of Spanish as well.

After nearly two weeks, I’d say that there is no icing on this cake.  The kids will not be learning a ton of Spanish in one month, unless something very unexpected happens next week.  That’s not to say they aren’t learning anything.  Annie regularly states, “Tengo hambre” before meals, and Stephen is improving his verb conjugations.  They all have great natural accents.  But, the moral of the story is that this is the first (hopefully) of many of these trips that will move us toward fluency as a family.

5 Big Picture Lessons Gleaned from our Spanish Immersion Experience:

1. Learning a language is challenging however and wherever you do it. The kids had 4 hours of Spanish daily in Costa Rica with one substantial break during the 4 hours.  However, learning a language is not altogether different from say, learning math.  Would you expect a child to sit for 4 hours every morning to learn math?

2. Schools in Central America are still taught on a strict Catholic school model. Kids are expected to remain seated quietly at their desks, listen to the teacher, and copy a lot down.  It’s not the active, creativity-based model you see in American elementary schools today.  Our Costa Rican Spanish teachers taught us the way they’d been taught.  We practically had to bribe them to take the kids on a walk or to the store.

3. Make sure the kids have activities each day at which they feel competent. For example, after Spanish school most days we went to the central park to play soccer with some of the local kids.  Stephen and Daniel love and are skilled at soccer.  One doesn’t have to speak Spanish to play soccer.  Therefore, soccer helped them recover from the tough mornings of Spanish school.

Annie’s comfort activity turned out to be playing with 1½ year-old Sofia, the granddaughter of our Costa Rican host mother.  Sofia adored Annie and it didn’t matter that Annie couldn’t speak Spanish because Sofia couldn’t either.  Annie picked up the majority of her Spanish while playing with Sofia and being spoken to in Spanish by Sofia’s grandma.

4. Bring something the kids can share with other kids, which doesn’t require much language. We brought cat’s cradle hand strings which we made ourselves.  When we met a new kid, we gave him a string, and our kids taught him various tricks with it.  As it turned out many Costa Rican kids were familiar with these and showed us some figures we’d never seen.

5. If you happen to have a grandma who’s fluent in Spanish, definitely bring her along! Ours couldn’t join us the entire time, but when there, smoothed out many a cross-cultural rough edge.

One final lesson:

Your child may do fine with milk at home but then throw up directly after breakfast for 2 days in a row in a foreign country.

My quote:

Least favorite verbs I had to learn on this trip: vomitar and tolerar.  As in, Daniel vomito again this morning.  I don’t think his estomago can tolera milkshake smoothies for breakfast anymore.  (Had to say this to our host mother during week 2.)

In next week’s post, read about what our kids actually took away from their Costa Rican experience (since you now know it wasn’t fluency in Spanish!)

Fall-back Skills

A few years back, I got my haircut from a woman new to our local salon.  She looked quite young, and later told me she was a part-time college student in her late twenties who cut hair 2 days a week.  She was one of 9 children and had learned to cut hair to pay her way through college.

It’s likely this young woman’s family circumstances forced her to learn a marketable skill at an early age, but I perked up when I heard her story because I’d already been thinking about a similar strategy for my kids.

With the recent shifts in our global economy, it’s risky to exit one’s twenties with just one work skill or profession in hand.  Why not encourage our kids to enter adulthood with more than one money-making possibility available to them?  I think of this as having a profession and a fall-back skill.  A fall-back skill would be one that people are continually willing to pay for, even during a recession.

Possible fall-back skills:

1. Haircutting

2. Plumbing

3. Fence building

4. Other basic carpentry skills

5. Certain computer or internet skills

6. Sewing

My kids are still young, who knows where their interests will lead them?  It’s possible they’d select one of the above options as their main work.  To that I’d say, “Fine, but choose another area as a fall-back skill.”

These days we parents do so much thinking and maneuvering regarding after-school activities.  Should he learn to play an instrument?  Should she join the soccer team now while everyone is still new at soccer?  Or perhaps her time would be better spent participating in math club after school.  It’s easy to focus only on sports and academics for our children, but job skills are another valuable area.

I recently read Plenitude, by Juliet Schor.  It’s basically about trading our old, broken down, unhealthy economy for a new type of economy.  She presents some extremely thought-provoking ideas and the research behind these.

In Schor’s “plenitude economy” everyone should work fewer hours on the job (like it so far?) which research shows actually reduces unemployment.

Sociologists Anders Hayden and John Shandra also found that hours of work are a significant predictor of one’s ecological footprint.  Reduce work hours, reduce overall energy consumption.  Households with more time flexibility can engage in slower, less resource-intensive activities, Schor notes.

“Recovering one’s time makes ‘self-provisioning’ (making, growing, and doing things for oneself) possible, revealing a liberating truth:  The less one has to buy, the less one is required to earn.”

Shor also uses the term “time wealth” in comparison to monetary wealth.  I love this concept!  She cites studies which have found that being time-affluent is positively associated with well-being, even when income is taken into consideration.

My fall-back skill plan would also give the kids the “I can do this myself” mindset that underscores self-provisioning.  My hope would be that possessing do-it-yourself skills would allow my kids to one day live the need-to-buy-less-and-therefore-earn-less lifestyle, if they chose.

Since I have elementary-aged children, I’m in the ideas phase of this venture.  Some thoughts regarding helping kids learn a fall-back skill:

1. Volunteer as a family for Habitat for Humanity. This one underscores many of our family’s values and I had been simply waiting until my youngest was old enough to safely and usefully volunteer there.  Recently, however, I discovered that you need to be 18 to volunteer at Habitat.  Thus, I am now looking for a similar organization.  Anyone know of a good one in the Boulder or Denver areas?

2.  When the kids are older, travel to the Shelter Institute as a family to participate in one of their weeklong programs. This family run organization has been teaching the skills of homebuilding, in addition to fine woodworking, for years.  And it’s located in beautiful New England!

3.  Mobilize the skills of friends and neighbors. When our neighbor, Danny, was building a chicken coop, I shooed the kids over to watch and lend a hand.  Then after the coop was in use, they learned chicken care (probably not a highly marketable fall-back skill, but good in other ways.)  I need to notice the many skills my neighbors have and set my kids up as worker’s helpers on their projects.

There are also psychological advantages to knowing you possess a fall-back skill.  Today, few people will remain at one job or profession throughout their lifetimes.  Having a fall-back skill in your back pocket would allow you to face a layoff or change of profession with much less apprehension.

Just don’t ask me what my fall-back skill is.  I think I’m still developing it.

____

Updates:

I asked my kids to make a green New Year’s Resolution this year, one that would help the earth in some way.  I said I’d help them if they needed ideas, then stepped back and tried not to be too intrusive.

Stephen (12) came up with writing to our congressional reps about a climate change issue.

Daniel (10) said, “My resolution is to not be as difficult about going to yoga.”  We decided that this was enough of a “green” resolution because if more people did yoga, climate change would be more under control.  This was merely our guess, but it seemed plausible.

Those of you who remember my post, My Humble Warriors: Yoga with Adolescents and Tweens, will recall that Daniel is the one who always gives us a hard time about yoga.  I was quite surprised, but delighted to hear this resolution.

Annie (7) decided that each week she would write down something good to do for the earth and then she would take this note around to our neighbors and ask them to sign off on it too.  I know, she clearly doesn’t have the resolution concept down yet.  But she was so eager about this plan that I just couldn’t burst her “green balloon.”  That day she wrote, “I’m going to turn off lights to save the Earth’s electricity,” on a piece of paper and took it to 4 neighbors who also signed off on this pledge.

Todd and I made green resolutions too and shared them with the kids, but they weren’t half as colorful as the ones the kids generated.