Why I Read Aloud to my Children ...

As a parent, I'm fairly diligent about only a few things: teaching my children about God and His ways, bedtimes, hygiene, and reading aloud.

Personally, I love reading. I always have, and I suppose that I always will. And, as a teacher, I knew that reading was one of the most important educational skills that children learn. Somewhere, long ago, I read an article about the best way to raise a reader was to make reading important in your home. It stuck with me and to this day I think of it quite often. That's why when I became a mom, I set out with a goal of raising my children to be excellent readers, so that they would grow into adults who were well-read and fully capable of learning by reading.

One of the ways I do this is to diligently spend half an hour or so reading aloud to the kids every single night. It's a practice that I started when Joel was maybe 2 months old. Every night, after we brush our teeth, we spend a little while reading before heading to bed. It's just what we do in our home as part of our bedtime routine. I usually read 1-2 picture books to Julia and then a chapter or two from a longer book to the boys (though Julia usually attempts to listen as well). I love sitting all snuggled up on the couch with the kids, reading from a good book. And what fun when we discover a book that we all love! (You can look on my sidebar and see a list of all the chapter books I've read aloud this year.)

I guess it probably doesn't come as a surprise that my boys are great readers. In fact, both boys were extremely early readers. Joel began reading shortly before his 4th birthday. As crazy as it sounds, he taught himself to read. Six months later, Joel decided to teach Nathan to read. I thought it was cute to see the two of them sitting together on the couch with a book between them, Joel pointing to each word and saying it while Nathan pointed and repeated the words back. I never gave much thought to if Joel's reading lessons were really working. However, it wasn't long before my mother (a first grade teacher) and I realized that Nathan was really reading and had not just memorized the words to his favorite books. He was just 3 years, 2 months old. We were astounded to say the least! Both boys not only learned to read amazingly young, but developed their reading skills with astonishing speed. I really didn't have to work to teach them to read. It sort of happened without much effort on my part. Now that they are 8 1/2 and 7, it is hard to remember a time when the two of them couldn't read. In fact, Nathan has even asked me if he was born knowing how to read because he doesn't remember a time when he couldn't read!

However, Julia has been a different story all together. To begin with, she's never shown as much interest in reading as her brothers ... until this summer. Suddenly, you could see the wheels turning. Julia began asking me to tell her what certain words said. Several times she cried when her teasing big brothers wouldn't let her play because she couldn't read yet. And many times every week, Julia asked me to teach her how to read.

We worked hard on learning letter sounds and I showed her how to sound out short words. I could tell Julia was working hard and wanting to read so badly, but so far it hadn't all come together for her. After school began, Julia began to bring home little pamphlets from school with short stories for the kids to "read." The kids read them over and over at school, and then brought them home to read to their parents. Julia was thrilled to have something that she could "read" and yet we both knew she had just memorized the words in those little take-home readers. I hate to admit it, but that bothered me. Even though I knew that some children weren't ready to read until age 6 or even 7, I still harbored some worries that maybe Julia wouldn't be able to learn to read very easily or that she would always struggle to learn reading skills.

Last Sunday evening, Julia brought me a stack of easy readers that she wanted me to read aloud to her. As I looked at thebooks, I noticed that they were books that we didn't read often, so I knew she hadn't memorized them. I also knew these books were probably easy enough for her to practice sounding out words. I felt like maybe it would be good for me to gauge how her reading skills were progressing in order for me to be better able to help her learn to read, and so I said, "I think I'd rather listen to you read those to me." She started to whine, "But I can't read, Mama!" So I assured her that I would help out anytime that she needed me to, but that I wanted her to try to read by herself ... at least one of the books in the stack.

There we sat, side by side on the bed ... Julia picked up the first book and read the first page. She went on to read the 2nd and 3rd and 4th pages without missing a single word. She had to ask me for help with one word on the last page. Julia put that book aside and picked up the next one. Again, she read and correctly sounded out each word in the book. It wasn't until Julia read the 3rd book through that she realized she was reading! Then she got so tickled at her success that she didn't want to stop. There wer about 8 of these little books. She read them all to me, and then read them all again! She kept saying, "I'm reading! Hey, you boys, I'm reading to Mama! I can read to you, too!" Of course, the boys, who've only been wanting their sister to read for the past 3 years, began to cheer and raise quite a rucus over Julia's success. We were so excited that it was quite sometime before we had all settled down from the celebration of Julia's reading success. That night, Julia went to sleep with her stack of easy readers held tightly in her arms. I love it!

This week happiness is being able to say that I'm the mother of 3 readers. Now, if I can just get them all raised to be adults who love the Lord with all their hearts, minds, souls and who remember to brush their teeth twice a day, then I'll really feel like a successful mother!