Showing Children the Joy of Reading

Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, is regarded as a “teacher’s guru” for her ideas on how to teach children to read and write. A whole language advocate who also attends to fundamentals such as spelling, she has inspired a generation of teachers to help the youngest children become confident writers. Even critics who dislike her whole language notions agree that her newest book, “Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent’s Guide,” offers much sound advice. The mother of two boys, Calkins spoke recently to parents at the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School at UCLA.

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Everyone here knows that there is nothing that matters more than our children’s reading. If our children read avidly and read a lot, they will write better, they will spell better, they will know more, they will care more. All things will come to those who read.

But we support reading in very different ways. I want to paint two extreme portraits to show you what I mean.

There are parents who say, when their children come home from school, “Do you have any homework?” And the child says, “Yes, I need to read.” And the parent says, “Well, you want to get your homework done right away. So why don’t you go up to your room and do your reading. Sit at your desk. . . . Because if you don’t do that reading, well, you’re never going to get into college. And I’m going to ask you some questions after. It really matters. . . . That’s how you get ahead--by reading.”

There are other parents who, when a child gets home from school, say, “Gosh, you’ve had a great long day at school. I bet you’re ready for time to just rest and snuggle down. Why don’t we each get our books and we can each read there on the sofa. I’m in the middle of mine now, I can’t bear to put it down.” And maybe you look up in the middle of reading and say, “I don’t know that book you’re reading. What’s it like? You’re so lucky to have teachers point you to amazing books like this. You’re going to love college--you get to read all day!”

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Those are both ways of supporting reading. But the first way conveys the message that reading is a distasteful thing that you need to do--it’s work. You go and you sit at your desk, you need to do it, I know you’re going to try to get out of it, but there’s a long-term reward--15 years from now. Hang in there.

The second conveys an incredibly different message--that reading is one of life’s greatest joys.

I got a call-in on the radio here in Los Angeles. The parent said, “I’ve got a fifth-grade daughter and she doesn’t really like to read. All her friends are avid readers. I’ve done everything right. What do I do?” I don’t know if the parent understood me, but I said, “Just don’t tell her that she doesn’t like to read.” The portrait we create of our child is a self-fulfilling one.

If your child doesn’t like to read, then find some way in which she is a reader. Perhaps she reads cereal boxes. Perhaps she reads magazines. Create an identity around that. [Say,] “You’re going to like reading all your life long, you can’t stop reading everything, that’s the stage you’re in. Pretty soon you’re going to be hunkering down with novels. You’re probably going to end up with book clubs in your life.”

We want to make sure that we don’t have in our homes or in our classrooms a slot for the kids who don’t like to read. We need to have lots of different kinds of readers.

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The other thing is, we need to dress our kids up to be readers. By that I mean we need to give them the stuff, the equipment, because with the equipment comes the identity. My boys like to do a lot of things downstairs. Their rooms feel far away and they like to be down around us. They each have a reading nook downstairs. So in the bathroom beside the heater there is a little reading lamp that comes out of the wall. It would look a little odd to you because it’s not a normal spot for a reading lamp. But Miles like to read in front of the heater, so we got him a little lamp set up there. And Evan likes to read in his pillow behind the big stuffed chair. So he’s got a little hanging lamp coming out of the wall behind the big stuffed chair.

The thing we most need to give our kids is time--time for reading. The only way to give kids time for reading is to cut down on the competition. My oldest son is a very avid reader. But even Miles would not read if he had the option to play on the computer. So we’ve got to limit these other things. For me it’s 20 minutes a day on the television or the computer.

The other thing is the friends. If your house is one of those open houses where it’s a sea of kids moving in and out, they won’t be reading a lot. It’s just one of the things we know: You tend to read by yourself.

For me, one of smartest things was two summers ago when Miles and Evan came down the first day of summer vacation at a quarter to 7 because they were used to going to school. I said to Evan, “Why are you downstairs?” [He said] “Well, because I woke up.” I said, “But Evan--it’s summer! In summer you lie in bed and read for 45 minutes. Everybody does that.” He said, “Oh, I didn’t know!”

You have to think: How can I create rituals in my child’s life where they’re going to read? One of the things we know about good readers is good readers read a lot.