An Idyllic Scene Of Sibling Bonding

Academy Award winning films are sometimes quirky, artsy, and esoteric. For your beginning reader, check out the Geisel Award recipients. This is another award by the American Library Association. Several of my children have been thrilled with nearly every award winner we’ve picked up. But not all of them. Meanwhile, the Spiderman movies thrill the masses. If that’s the boat you’re in, take heart! There is still hope. At seven, he didn’t like reading for fun. Or so I thought, until we began our digital detox. I realized that if we could only ignite his love of reading, he would fill his time with a productive, pleasurable, and educationally enriching activity. We went to the library. He enjoyed the library from day one, flipping through various titles.

In Some Small Way

I searched the stacks, checking out copies from the Super Chicken Nugget Boy, Hardy Boys, I Survived . I sat down and showed each one to my son. He tolerated a few of them. But once he began reading Geronimo Stilton, something clicked. The kid likes fantasy. It all starts at the library. I’m supposed to take all my noisy, wild kids to the library? I know firsthand that shepherding loud, grabby toddlers through a quiet place is enough to give you the sweats. Might as well be guiding blind feral cats through a museum, right? Someone has to teach our precious children about the basic norms of the civilized world. And that someone is you. If your children are small, or if you have a lot of them, it will be hard. Your kids will learn and grow with every visit. Will they fail and scream and embarrass you? You are normalizing library visits.

Point Of No Return

You are also encouraging them to develop responsibility. Watch your kids light up as they scan their very own cards with their names on them. Tell her that the library is a special place where we share great stories with all the people in our big city! This is her big girl job. Look out for these programs as you head in. Take advantage of this resource! You are teaching your tiniest kids that the nonfiction section is not an obstacle course, how to wait their turn quietly, and how to respect and return borrowed items. But the more you visit, the more your kids will begin to understand the way it all works. When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. Think back to your own elementary school experience. You can’t leave it here! You can make those kinds of memories and build that same anticipation and love of story in your living room. Read aloud, my friend. Give your characters accents. Set a minimum, maybe five minutes.

There's Still Time For It

You can reassure your reluctant newbie that we are doing this thing for five minutes, and if we want to keep going, we can. But if we’d like to be all done for today, that’s all right too. Check in after five minutes. Want to be all done, or should we keep going? Read for however long you and the kids can handle. Reading aloud to your kids is the simplest and most effective activity for bonding, stress relief, education, listening comprehension, vocabulary building, team building, imagination spurring, building sustained attention, and more. Research supports it. Intuition insists on it. It will repay itself one thousand times over in emotional, relational, and intellectual dividends. I offer you a story. The sink was piled high with dishes. Laundry needed folding. The chores could wait. I knew we all needed some bonding and Bible time. Frankly, I needed the morale boost. I prepared for an idyllic scene of sibling bonding and spiritual growth. She ran off to look for it while the rest of us waited. I couldn’t find it, she said, wearing an old pair of sunglasses and multiple baseball hats. She had clearly spent the time excavating crevices in the car. It was exactly where I said it was. I returned to the lawn and began to read. There is an entire lawn to sit on. It also broke the final straw of my rapidly fraying patience. This has been a monumental waste of my time, I huffed. Tossing the children’s Bible on my chair, I retreated back into the house, seeking solace in my sink full of dishes. Not my best mothering. But I was frustrated, darn it! I wondered if they were absorbing any of the reading, the stories, the lessons and love I had been pouring out. I thought they had been enjoying our regular read alouds, but the disruptions were making me question everything. Why must they act like brawling fraternity brothers? How could they absorb even a smidgen of my beautiful stories when they’re arguing and distracted? It seemed like every time we read aloud together, there was always an obstacle. I scrubbed the dishes and wiped down the counters with just the right combo of elbow grease and mom guilt. I called the kids back inside so we could put away laundry together. Two of the boys, seven and nine, picked up an old argument. I opened my mouth to intervene. Stop! she proclaimed. The boys froze in surprised confusion. Is this what you want? she went on. To repay evil for evil? We’d read that story a week or two ago. Not only had she understood and remembered it, but now she was using it to exhort her older siblings. Look at him! she motioned each brother to the other. The boys’ fight was silenced. We all paused for a few seconds to process what had just happened, and then the giggles began. The three older kids, including the two who had been fighting, were shocked. After twelve sessions, the babies who heard the language spoken through live people could recognize Mandarin. The good, the bad, and the ugly.