Diane Wallace, a City of Ithaca resident, has written for local newspapers and several family magazines. She volunteers with the Family Reading Partnership and the Girl Scouts.
When I met Brigid Hubberman at Belle Sherman Elementary School in 1995 I had already been reading aloud to my children for years.
Of course I wasn’t only reading to my kids to be a good parent and raise good readers. For me, reading out loud was a lifesaver. At all ages it quieted them down and improved the mood of the household. Reading was my secret ingredient, the magic wand in my toolbox.
As babies, when they were scarfing down milk or fussing, I read out loud to them from The Very Hungry Caterpillar – but also from the New Yorker magazine, because the sound of my voice was calming, and I could entertain myself besides.
As toddlers, they could wear out even those sturdy board books. And, as preschoolers they adored such classics like “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny.” They grew up surrounded by books we all loved and were read to daily, for both the pleasure and the practicality.
But one evening in the spring of 1995 Belle Sherman parent Brigid Hubberman spoke at one of the school’s “library nights.” Although she had not yet become the Family Reading Partnership’s director, she had already embarked on a crusade to inform parents of young children of the many benefits of reading to children.
Just as importantly, she encouraged us all not to stop reading to our children after they began reading for themselves, but to keep right on reading aloud to them for as many years as we could manage it.
Inspired to keep going, I borrowed an armload of recommended books to take home and started a reading log with my children, then ages 7 and 8, of our shared book adventures.
Now, when I look over that list it is 65 books long, starting with Roald Dahl’s “BFG” and “James and the Giant Peach;” winding its way through the “Little House on the Prairie” series, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and “Avi’s Poppy;” and rounding off with the “Harry Potter” series, Philip Pullman’s fantasies, and the classic “Anne of Green Gables.”
It is very true that reading aloud was utter pleasure and worthwhile besides. It brought us together for many hours, often with the children either begging for one more chapter and begging to stay up later.
To be honest, sometimes the suspense was killing me too. Once in a while, I sought out my children with book in hand to ask, “Can we read a little more after you build that Lego house?”
Over the years, car trips were made sane simply by stocking up on library audiotapes. On more than a few occasions we all trooped into the house after a 5-hour drive and turned on the cassette player to finish listening to our latest book on tape. During the middle school years, the hours of homework, sports, music and other activities tend to squeeze out our family reading time – except during the summer months.
Yet the long term effects of years of reading aloud have staying power. How else could they have come by a passion for books, a great love of story and a tremendous store of background information? And, too, reading aloud has recycled into starting a mother-daughter book club for the middle school crowd, and also into a new family passion: attending plays around town and while traveling.
Looking back, reading To Kill A Mockingbird aloud together proved to be the watershed experience. We took on this challenge when the kids were still in elementary school in order to better enjoy a friend’s role in the Hangar Theatre’s production.
Through this experience I learned that not only could I be a part of my children’s world, by sharing the wonderful world of children’s literature; but they were ready to start sharing in my world.
Not only did I learn that my children had developed sustained and dependable attention spans and could appreciate more complex and multiple themes, I also realized that they were ready to attend and enjoy many offerings of the theater – and that read alouds had prepared them for this.
The willingness to concentrate on a developing story line, an appreciation for characters, growing vocabularies, and joy in a good story unfolding: these fruits of reading aloud transferred just as easily from reading into theater. And though we had always attended various children’s theater series around town, after the play of To Kill a Mockingbird, I knew we could also look at some of the season’s line-up for grown-ups, too.
I think I’ll always miss the days of reading about, say, the quirky Finn Family Moomintroll or the masterful escapes of a hamster in “I, Houdini.” And I plan to read the fifth “Harry Potter” aloud even if I have to wait until both children are filling out college applications when it’s published.
But if the warm, cuddly early years of family reading time have largely passed, we have many quiet evenings when we all can be found reading on our own.
Plus I have now gained a party of four to attend evening theater. And who knows where that may lead, because that is another tale yet to be told.
Family Reading Partnership
Ithaca, New York
Phone: 607-277-8602
Email: office@familyreading.org
