readers & reading

There's a delightful comment from Barb (Las Vegas, NV) on yesterday's blog entry. I'll copy it here, to make it easier for you to access:

My son Joshua (who is 12 and homeschooled) and I would like to thank you for the Cottage Tales and tell you how very much we are enjoying reading the series. I read the first two books myself after a recommendation from another homeschooling mom and happened to share the part in Holly How where Professor Galileo Owl recites his famous speech to the animals before they head off on their mission. Josh and I were studying Shakespeare's Henry V at the time and reciting the St. Crispin's speech. As I read this passage his eyes got wide as he recognized the piece (albeit a little changed lol) and after inquiring what the book was about ask me to use it as our read aloud. He was hooked and we are both anticipating the third book coming out soon. We even used Holly How for our reading during our usual Tuesday Teatime as we had a Beatrix Potter Tea one week. I have recommended the book/series on my homeschool blog on two different posts which you can read here and here. Thank you again for sharing these wonderful stories!

This is a reader's report that I will always cherish, for it reminds me how important it is for parents to participate in their children's reading, and to help them access texts that they might not otherwise encounter. I love the connection that Josh and his mom were able to make between the Shakespeare passage and the Professor's rendition of it, and the pleasure it gave them to recognize the comic exaggeration in the Owl's version. With enormous enjoyment, I imagine the two of them reading it out loud, comparing the lines and giggling over the funny parts. Josh is a lucky kid to have a mom who guides his reading, Barb is a lucky mom to have a kid who is able to read and appreciate Henry V, and they're both lucky to be able to read together. If there's a clearer testimony to the value of home-schooling, I haven't seen it yet.

Thinking about Josh and his mother made me think about my own reading experiences, when I was a child. It was my father who was the reader in our family. He was mostly a solitary reader, and I was too. I read what he read: mysteries (he was a Rex Stout fan, and loved Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers) and westerns (Zane Gray, Louie L'Amour), but also Dickens, Austen, and Trollope. He used reading as an escape from the family, and I did too. Reading was a way of being alone, of going somewhere by myself, even when I had to be with other people. I'm still a solitary reader. It's still my greatest escape.

But one family reading experience has stayed in my mind through all the years: family Bible reading. Every now and then, my dad would "get religion," and for months at a stretch we'd all truck off to church. This was not much to my liking, or my brother's, and we were always relieved when Dad would go back to his non-religious ways and we were released from all those Sunday schools and prayer meetings. But when my father was doing his "church thing," he made us sit down together every night and read a chapter of the Bible out loud. Each of us, one chapter. We read the King James version, of course, and it made a profound impression on me. I can still hear that stately, sonorous language, feel the rhythm, recall the rich poetry of it. That reading aloud shaped my own use of language: it gave me fluency, taught me some vocabulary I wouldn't have otherwise have known ("What does 'fornication' mean?"), and required me to puzzle out syntactical patterns I wouldn't encounter again until I studied Shakespeare in college. My father meant the oral Bible reading to teach me morality, but it did much more than that, and I'm enternally grateful.

I envy Josh his experience of reading with his mother. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all kids (and all parents) could read together? Thank you, Barb, for sharing!

Reading note: "We read to know we are not alone."--C.S. Lewis

Comments

[Robert]

"Freckles, by Gene Stratton Porter" is one of the many books my mother read to my brother and me. We could hardly wait for the next installment. This would have been after we moved to town where we had electric lights. While I don't remember the stories she read to us in the old farm house I do remember the battery powered radio and the kerosene lamps. When the reading was over for the evening, and the lamp carried out of the room I pulled the quilt over my head to keep the monsters at bay.
So we read to our children and now read to our grandkids. They think it is a special treat when they get Oma or Opa instead of mom or dad. I doubt they really know how special the treat is for us.
Thanks for the reminder of such special memories.
I have the copy of Freckles my mother read to me, with 12 or so pages missing from the middles of the book.(as they were no doubt when she read it to me)
Robert