The Gift of Reading

My daughter had her ninth birthday at the end of August, and we celebrated with not one but two parties: a biggish one at home with her Vancouver friends, and a smaller one on the beach with three of her oldest friends from Seattle and their families.

My daughter is the youngest in the group, so now these four “girl’s gang” members are all nine years old. They’ve always shared interests—at least some interests—and I was quietly thrilled to see that those interests now include books, specifically Rick Riordan’s popular series of books about Percy Jackson, and that one of my daughter’s friends gave her a copy of The Lightning Thief, the first volume in the series, as a birthday present.

My kid was immediately obsessed with the book and started reading it on the drive home. She got distracted by birthday and back-to-school stuff and forgot about it for a couple of weeks, but then picked it up again and read it continuously—in the car; at Rosh Hashanah services; in bed; at meals (when we let her)—emerging only to ask the occasional question about the pronunciation or meaning of some Greek-mythology-related word before dipping her head back into the book. Last night, she triumphantly turned the last page, and immediately dove into the next book in the series, The Sea of Monsters, which my spouse had considerately brought home from the library already.

I've often been astonished at the textbook developmental pattern my kid appears to be following for reading: she listened eagerly to picture books in preschool and kindergarten; learned to read on her own in first grade; struggled through early readers in second; spent last year gaining confidence and fluency by tearing through reams of short, easy chapter-book series and listening to books on CD; and now, just as she turns the corner on fourth grade, she’s tackling meatier stuff in print.  It’s exciting to watch, and it makes me (and her) happy that it’s also a way for her to stay in touch and in tune with the friends she’s had since babyhood.

Comments

[Charlotte]

I'll have to try the Lightning Thief on own nine year old..I'm worried, though, that he isn't confident enough and will give up after twenty pages, so I've been holding off....sigh.