Gulf Coast Family

I’m pretty sure that I have been a bookworm for my entire life. I can remember as a 4-year-old, insisting that my mom read the story Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel every single time we went to our doctor’s office. Then when I learned to read, I loved reading Dr. Seuss books (Fox in Socks was my favorite) and Disney fairy tales. Soon, I moved on to Little House books and Nancy Drew mysteries. And my parents have a cassette tape proving that I liked to “read” even before I can remember doing so – I had the entire story of A Runaway Pancake memorized before I turned two, and I used to quote it to my dad regularly.

“He picked the first book and muddled through it, reading exactly one chapter per day”

It isn’t surprising then, that all of my kids love books. But since their dad has never particularly been a bookworm, I guess it’s also not surprising that a few of them don’t really care to read themselves – they’d much rather have someone else read to them.

My oldest is just like me – he can spend hours reading. Sometimes, we’ve caught him with a flashlight in his bed in the wee hours of the morning because he doesn’t want to put his book down. But his younger siblings aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about reading.

About four weeks ago, while I was at the library, I came up with a plan to encourage my 9-year-old, Daniel, to read on his own. I checked out a few boy-friendly books for him and told him that each day for the rest of the summer, he would not be allowed to play video games until he had read at least one chapter from one of those books. I let him choose which one to start with and left it at that.

He picked the first book and muddled through it, reading exactly one chapter per day. There were about 20 chapters in the book, so it took him almost 3 weeks to finish. When he picked his next book, he looked through them and picked out The Tale of Despereaux for the sole reason that most of the chapters are only about 4 or 5 pages long.

Then an amazing thing happened – the book actually captured his attention, and he read the entire thing in eight days. With over 50 chapters, that is an average of 6 to 7 chapters per day – way more than I had required of him!

Now I realize that it might be a long time before we can find another obvious winner like that. But it was very encouraging to know that the winners are out there. And even a child who wants to play video games all day long can occasionally be swept away by the magic of a well-told story.