i often think about the finch family. my favorite book of all time is to kill a mockingbird and i fell in love with scout, atticus and jem, as i'm sure is quite common for readers of this book. how could you not fall in love with them? i would read that book cover to cover every time that i returned to my mom's house post college. when we packed up her home a few years ago, it was still sitting in the bottom drawer of my dresser in my former room. currently, i think boo radley lives around the corner from us. i'll show you his house if you want to see it. my girls even refer to it as the boo radley house and i tease them and ask them if they want to trick-or-treat there. i'm getting off topic way too early into this post. you get the point, though. i love books!
when i was a teacher in chicago i was met with a task that felt insurmountable. i was challenged with 55 fourth graders that could barely read. more than a handful of my students were exhibiting a bare minimum of pre-reading skills. a few of them were on or just below level. but the majority of them had skills that teetered between a first and second grade reading level. my task was to get them up to speed. as if that wasn't enough of a challenge, most of them lived in non-traditional home environments. they had daddies they didn't know, brothers in jail, aunties with drug addictions, homelessness, abuse, poverty, neglect... you name it and i had a student that lived that reality. teaching them to read sometimes felt like the secondary task and loving them well often felt like the primary task.
during that time in my life, i bought a lot of books. i felt that if of these precious students could take home a story about someone else's life then maybe they might be able to escape a bit from the harshness of their own home environments. i also felt like it might open their eyes to a bigger more different world than they had known so far. or maybe, it might help them cope as they related to a character living similarly to themselves. books are like that. they open our eyes and give us insight. they allow us to get lost in new places and imagine beyond our current reality. in some ways books are like playing dress-up. i wanted them to "try on" a different lifestyle and begin to imagine contrasting opportunities for themselves.
as a result of this era in my life my office is currently filled with books of all reading levels. in some ways, it is like having an on-site library. my girls rotate the books in their rooms with the books in my office and read themselves to sleep each night. we have an early bedtime to accommodate this habit and it is music to my ears when i hear them "reading" just beyond their closed doors. as much as i dislike the mess, i also secretly love it when i find a new stack of books (that wasn't there when i tucked them in the night before) piled next to them in the morning.
i was thinking recently that i wanted to mark some of their favorites at this moment in time. i imagine that i'll want to do this again in the future. i also imagine that it will be fun to look back and see their literacy progression.
poppy's favorite book happens to be one that i used to thumb through as a little girl. she fell in love with it as a baby, rejected it for a bit, and then fell in love with it all over again recently. it is one of the few books that was given specifically just to her.
her favorite page reads, "...and do lot of things by themselves." it is referring to what babies do. i like it because my less than independent third child might take the hint from the text that babies are supposed to try to do things on their own. she likes it because the boy baby (who is telling the kitty "no") is showing his bum.
a funny sidebar- when i was a girl my aunts gave my sisters and i a book titles gnomes. it was this huge coffee table book that detailed the life and existence of gnomes. i can remember sitting on the living room floor giggling alongside my sisters at the image of one of the gnomes showing his tushy while going potty in the woods. i guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. pops and i both appear to have a thing for the tush. giggle.
and my e is also on a sharon creech bender. she has just recently cracked the cover of walk two moons and has read love that dog and ruby holler more times than she or i can count. again, apple/tree. e is, by far, the biggest reading lover of the three. while she doesn't typically read during the day, she spends hours in the evening pouring over books.
last saturday e, d, p and i all cuddled up in the living room. ellie read to us for the better part of an hour from a book of fables. i loved listening to her read- the inflection of her voice, the mastery of difficult words, the process of decoding. it is a beautiful thing to watch your very own develop in this way... at least for this momma.
my favorite book as a child was miss nelson is missing. i can recall reading that book over and over and over again. i loved detective mcsmogg and the idea of miss nelson getting carried off by a swarm of butterflies. my kids do not share my love for this book. we have two copies and i continue to try and push it into the book rotation. inevitably it will end up back on my office floor.
pops opened to this page and said, "see, momma. this book is no good."
i guess sometimes the apple falls close and at other times if falls very far away. smile.
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