This week we have considered the critical role read aloud plays in teaching children to read and hypothesizing that some of the difficulties children are having are due to receiving less and less exposure to great texts through read aloud. In part 1 of this series we talked about how Joanne Hindley’s father, who struggled to read, was saved by a mother who chose to read aloud pocket westerns rather than have her son labor through textbooks prescribed as an intervention by his teacher. Yesterday, in Part 2 of this series, we discussed “Maritime Disasters,” Bailey White’s essay about teaching first graders to read by first showing them the power of words. Today, we want to talk about Cal, from That Book Woman.
Cal didn’t want to learn to read, or so he said. He called the print on the page “chicken scratch” and couldn’t understand why his sister always had her nose buried in the books delivered every two weeks by “the book woman,” who rode her horse for miles to make sure families in the remotest parts of Kentucky in the 1930s had access to books. But the persistence of the book woman, snowstorms that kept his family locked indoors, and the continued example of his sister helped Cal reconsider his position.
As Cal watches the book woman leave his home one snowy evening, he “yearns to know what makes that Book Woman risk catching cold, or worse.” In this moment, he sees the influence that words have on his sister and the “book woman” and he “picks a book with words and pictures, too” and holds it out to his sister and asks, “Teach me what it says.”
What we love about That Book Woman is that it speaks to the ability of books to sell themselves to children. In children’s literature, there are a lot of books about children who read. Some of the characters have difficulty learning to read, while others are avid readers. There are fewer books, however, that show how students are seduced by books in ways that make the labor of early reading worth the effort. Books such as Thank You, Mr. Falker and Hooray for Reading Day! serve as powerful tools for launching discussions about what it takes to learn to read and why it is worth the effort.
Help us out! Do you know of other books that show non-readers or struggling readers discovering the power of reading and then persisting to claim that power for themselves?