Doug Lemov's field notes

As some of you may know my next book is going to be about reading, a topic I care deeply about not only because I am an educator but because I am a parent.  My favorite hobby is reading with my kids.  They’re 12, 10 and 5 and I try to be intentional not only about how I read but what.  Here are some thoughts about our reading lives together.

How we read:

I love reading aloud to my kids.  It lets me bring a book to life and model not only what fluent expressive reading sounds like but my love for a book.  My kids see me relish a certain word or phrase, dramatize a key scene, or feel one deeply and that shows them, I hope, the full range of emotions you can have while reading.  Reading aloud to them also allows me to introduce more sophisticated texts into their rotation—I can read to them books that have more challenging vocabulary and syntax than they could read on their own. And it allows me to ask them questions and augment their background knowledge. This morning my daughter and I came across the phrase ‘black market’… I defined it for her but then we got to talk about it: could she think of an example of something that might get sold on a black market; what the sale might look like (she suggested someone selling something out of the back of their car) what it’s word charge was (generally negative) but whether there could be cases where a black market was a good thing (e.g. black market for books in the former Soviet Union).  If they are reluctant to read (it happens to us too!) reading aloud is the ticket.  I will start reading to one of them and the other will inevitably come over and join us once the story starts.

I also love having them read to me.  Sometimes they love to read aloud and sometimes they are lukewarm on it but I just remind them how much I love hearing them read and seeing the book through their eyes.  Usually I will alternate with them… I’ll read a few pages, they read a few pages. If the book is tricky I might take a bit more of it. But having them read to me allows me to get a sense for their skills: how fluent are they? How much does their reading show their comprehension of a character’s perspective etc.  Yes, I correct their ‘errors’ such as missed words, usually with something easy and upbeat—“Ooh, check that sentence again?” or “Mmmm, that word is tricky, it’s French and sound like this…”  As they get older I’ll probably ask them to read a little less and listen a little more if they tell me they don’t want to but I really love shared reading.  It can be a bonding experience.

The bigger kids also love read on their own, and a larger and larger proportion of their reading is now independent.  In part because they want it that way.  My son read Animal Farm this year, for example, and though I really wanted to read it with him, he really wanted to do it on his own so I let him. But I still keep pretty involved in their reading lives even when they read on their own.  First, I help them choose books. I’ll bring them a stack of suggestions and let them choose… or talk through their choices.  My son brought four or five Agatha Christie mysteries home from the library the other day and we talked through which would be best to start with and why.  Not to mention he had the stack in the first place because my wife and I put his first Agatha Christie book in his hand.  The story behind that is worth telling.  My son loves mystery and fantasy—two genres I don’t like very much—and I am always trying to broaden my kids’ reading to address their background knowledge. So Agatha Christie seemed like a great way to let him read something he’d like that would also have lots of British syntax and vocabulary and lots of facts that would grow his knowledge of the world.  By the way, one other advantage of giving them books we know something about is that my wife and I can ask them to tell us about them at bed time or while we’re driving to soccer practice.  I also use this if I start a book aloud with one of my kids but then they take it over and start reading it independently.  I can ask them, “What’s happening in X book?” and check in with their reading lives.

Finally our kids love books on tape.  My older daughter especially but even the five year old likes it…. I think it feels very grown up to her.  And since they want technology, having a book on the Kindle seems like a good way to give it to them.

 

Some favorite books

For my 5 year old:

Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder: I read the entire nine book Little House series with my older daughter and she loved it like no other books.  So evocative and simple and insightful and perfect.  Maybe the best books ever.  (Not just for girls… contrary to popular opinion).  Started now on the first one with the littlest Lemov.  We just take it on very slowly and I explain a lot. But the story is perfect and the writing so crisp that she loves it.  And it builds SO MUCH knowledge about history.

Stuart Little, E.B. White:  Just started it. She’s been happy as a clam with this one.  She thinks it’s hilarious.  You may have noticed that I really like reading chapter books with my kids, even at 4. I really like the idea of a long narrative sustained over time with a relationship to the characters.  Brings joy and intellectual development.  I remember reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to my son when he was five.  We were cuddled up reading that thing for hours at a time.  Just like my littlest one is now with Little House and Stuart Little. It’s like a trance and I love that it builds sustained concentration over time.

The Littles:  These are shorter, but it’s a nice series and seems to fire her imagination in just the right way.

My ten year old: 

Some of the big hits this year have been:

Black Beauty

Lily’s Crossing

Secret Garden

Tale Dark and Grimm

 

Black Beauty and Secret Garden were brilliant… they  are both more than 100 years old which I think is super important.  Kids have to be exposed to the syntax of how people wrote and spoke in previous generations.  And there was so much we learned about history… especially in Black Beauty where the everyday details of life before the internal combustion engine are thick and rich… a materialist historian couldn’t do much better.  But more than that the way stories were told to children 100+ years ago was just different, the narrative style sustained and elegiac at times and just a twitch formal.  I wouldn’t have traded reading these with my daughter for anything.  Lily’s Crossing was neat too… historical fiction is my favorite and this was a big success.  And at the end she said, “Thanks for choosing that book for me,” which means that my opinion will continue to carry weight, at least for the near future.  A Tale Dark and Grimm  was a bit of a departure for us… very post-modern, very dark and much more edgy than anything else we’ve read.   I advise caution and pre-reading, which by the way I do relentlessly… I read youth fiction constantly to choose the books I do and don’t want to suggest to my kids.  Someone I really trust suggested Hunger Games for example but I read it first and decided not to share with my kids.  But back to Tale Dark and Grimm.  My niece was reading it so my daughter came upon it that way and we were a bit worried—it’s very violent but in a strange way—but in the end it worked out fine.  It has a tongue-in-cheek narrative that’s rich in irony and defuses much of the violence.  The author is constantly making reference to his own artifice and craft and this in turn put those things clearly before my daughter’s eyes.

My 12 Year old: 

Agatha Christie

Animal Farm

The Giver and subsequent sequels up to and including Son

My son is developing relationships with authors and ideas and his reading this year reflects it.  It started when we re-read the Giver. He’d already read it once a year or two ago, but I had been doing some work on short stories for our teachers—part of my argument was that they were so useful because they could so easily be re-read and students could see the foreshadowing and the themes developing with the clarity of hindsight.  He loved it the first time around and I find the book so subtle and insightful that I suggested he re-read it and see how much he saw in it the second time around.  That was a great success and we talked about the genre of dystopian fiction quite a bit. So I handed him Animal Farm, which he liked and which we will probably also re-read.  Then he went on to read the entire cycle of Giver books…. There are four and he says the first and last are by far the best.  Later we got into Agatha Christie—for reasons I discussed above—and he’s on his fourth of fifth now.  I think my next move will be a deep reading of To Kill a Mockingbird because…

Summer Books

…Each summer I try to choose a couple of very special books.  I spend a couple of weeks choosing them and bring them on vacation when, after swimming and biking and hiking and the like, we often spend hours lying on the floor of a condo in Vermont reading aloud together.  It’s a time when I can deliberately choose something great and challenging and powerful.  This year will be either To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies.  Even as my kids get older I hope to retain this ritual… sharing a special book together at the time of year when we have the time to indulge in reading together.   Our summer reads have been some of our best moments and just maybe they will carry the pleasure of reading aloud to one another even into adulthood.

Parenting, Reading with Kids, Summer reading