creating readers

I was emailing with a friend during Christmas and she commented that she and her husband hope that their daughter (who is currently 2) will be an early reader and love books and reading as much as they do.

We've been successful so far with instilling a love of reading and books in our children - we're two for two with our girls being early readers, both right around their 4th birthdays. We have 3 more to go, but Birdie, who turns 3 in April, is off to a similar start.

So what's the secret to our success?

What happened with Sunny was that she knew the alphabet before she was two. We didn't intend to teach her that early, and didn't deliberately do so. We just read little board books with her a lot because she liked them, and we had a couple of alphabet books in the rotation. (The Sandra Boynton alphabet book was a favorite.) We discovered that she could recognize the letters one day when she was sitting on AC's lap and started identifying the letters on his shirt.

That was as far as it went for quite awhile. We still read a lot with her and started taking her to the library, but mostly just let her play in the kids section. Our local library had a fantastic kid section with a dollhouse, letter magnets, wood puzzles, and some other quiet learning toys. We read a few books while there but didn't push her with that. When she was 3, I tried to teach her to sound out words but it was NOT clicking. Right when she turned 4, my mom came to visit for a couple of weeks, and somewhere in there, she figured it out. I have no idea what my mom did, but when she arrived, Sunny was not even sounding things out yet. When my mom left, she was darn near reading on her own. That was in May. By the end of the summer, she was reading on her own, and that fall, we started her on chapter books. We read the first few out loud with her, but within a year of starting to read, she was in chapter books on her own. Now she's been reading for 2 1/2 years and I can't tell you what all she's gone through. Tons.

Posy started reading on her own when she was still 3 - almost 4, but she beat her birthday. Her development has been much slower. She turned 5 in October and has shown no interest at all in chapter books, at least not the size that Sunny tackles. She occasionally picks up Magic Treehouse or Flat Stanley, but not very often. When we have her read out loud, she does just fine. But she sticks with the beginner books. She doesn't even sit with us and listen when Sunny and I are reading a more extensive chapter book out loud together.

What we did with them both (and now we're doing with the younger girls) is read to them a lot and see what they pick up on their own. If reading and books are part of your family culture and environment, you're on the right track.

AC has talked to a couple of non-reader friends about this subject and a comment that stuck with him is that one guy said that he doesn't really read as an adult because he didn't grow up around books. There weren't any in his house. So we buy as many books as we feel like, for ourselves as well as for the girls. New books are rewards to be earned - I have a stash in the top of my closet for that purpose. We let them bring home as many books as they want from the library, even when I know I won't read all of them to them - sometimes our checkout slip is more than 12 inches long. We get literally as many books as we can carry, and if the stroller is in the library with us, it becomes a book cart. In addition to the many, many books on our shelves around the house, we have 15 boxes in the closet of more books that we don't have the shelf space for. There are BOOKS in our house - the title of this blog "We live in a library" is not a joke or an exaggeration.

You want an early and prolific reader? Then make your child's life all about reading books as much as your's is! It's our secret of success!