Ducks to Water

My kids love to read ~ which of course warms this book lover’s heart.

It wasn’t always so. What I mean is: they didn’t begin reading at 3 years old.  Isn’t it funny how our memories of our reading as children don’t match up with what probably actually happened.

I remember always loving to read. I had an hour bus ride to and from school, and I always read the whole way.  I loved it. But if I think back, I didn’t know how to read when I went to kindergarten.  I remember learning my letters from some big blow-up monster letter characters. The T was particularly wonderful. I remember continuing to learn to read in the first grade, and it wasn’t till the third or fourth grade that my reading took off.

Which is exactly where my kids are.

But the myth. Oh the myth.  We love it so, we falsely remember having always read.  And we forget what a struggle it was at first.  The single biggest contributor to my reading, I think now, is that fact that I had all that time on the bus that I had nothing else to do.  I still would have loved reading, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

What did it for my kids was Harry Potter. We’ve always read before going to bed, and they love that, but it was more of a social thing.  This summer, however, was the Summer of Harry Potter. We read a couple of chapters every night, and they lived for it. Over the course of the summer, we got all the way up to and almost through book 5.  I think ~ and hope ~ that it’ll be one of those things they’ll remember fondly their whole lives. 

But since then, they’ve dived in. They read all the time on their own. The first series that really caught my daughter was the Boxcar Children.  The first that really caught by son was Percy Jackson. And off they go.

I get a warm fuzzy glow when I think about all the lovely reading they have ahead of them!