Best Intentions: Kid Readalong
Making this post even more pathetic is how late it is.
At the beginning of the summer, I was all full of vim and vigor and determined to be a good summer parent. “We are going to have a family reading project!” I announced.
The enthusiasm was not infectious.
The idea was that my two boys, 8yo Guppy and nearly 11yo at the time Drake would read a book then write its title, author and a sentence about it in a notebook. I would read the same books, and we’d talk about them.
Great idea, right? Except that they both devoured all five Percy Jackson books in a week, not possible for me to follow suit given that I’m in three books groups AND FLIRTING WITH TWO OTHERS, WTH?
So I managed to re-read both Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie and Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game.
All three of us liked them, we even dragged my husband G. Grod in, but the idea of all four of us reading the same books over the summer was ______
Like Mad Libs, let’s fill in the adjectives: bat$shit crazy? Crazytown bananapants? Well intentioned? Misguided? Delusional? Dumb? Silly?
And that just addresses the “all read the same book” premise. I surprisingly didn’t get much pushback on “let’s all read novels so you put down those stupid Garfield and Foxtrot collections” aspect. What I did receive floods of complaints on was the writing three things in a notebook. A couple samples:
This is Drake’s. He obviously NEEDS practice on his handwriting. Translated:
The Westing Game. Ellen Raskin. Well, Westing/McSouthers/Eastman/Northrup was right; I would not buy something called Windkloppel toilet tissues!
He correctly used a semicolon, but cannot capitalize correctly.
This was from 8yo Guppy. Translation:
The Sea of Monsters. Rick Riordan. Percy sails over a a title (sea of monsters).
While using the title as a noun is clever, this is merely restating the picture on the cover. Nice try, Guppy. It was better than this one, though.
A Wrinkle in Time graphic novel. Madeleine L’engle. It is science fiction. There are people.
And that was what eventually got me to give up. At which point they stopped reading novels.
So, thanks to me, the road to hell has yet another brick.
I won’t give up, though. I’m biding my time, gathering my strength, like that titan in Percy Jackson does (I just started #4). Novels, and loving them, are just too important to give up on.
And, Drake’s handwriting still needs work. As does Guppy’s smartassery.
September 18th, 2014 at 4:43 am
maybe it’s just the writing about them they don’t love? (I have a lot of voracious readers who hate writing in their response journals)
one great summer project of yrou and the boys might be reading one of the Newbery winners and making a film for the 90-second newbery festival!!!
http://jameskennedy.com/90-second-newbery/
I saw some seriously fun stuff there. (I worked with the guy who runs it one summer.)
September 18th, 2014 at 11:08 am
Carolyn, it was both the formulation of a sentence about the book (thus, thinking about it and drawing a conclusion) AND the physical act of writing that were painful. The reading itself went well, though they still have a predilection for Garfield and Dr. Who magazine.