Childhood

Things Not To Do

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Apr 8, 2021 in Childhood, Children's Literature, Educators & Librarians | 0 comments

Let them read!

A middler schooler I happen to know was picking out a book from her school library the other day. The staff member frowned at it, announced to the room that it had rather mature themes, and then handed it to her after all.

Just…don’t.

If a book isn’t right for middle schoolers, don’t have it in the library. If a book is in the library and a student chooses it, don’t criticize it and embarrass her in front of all her classmates.

(The book was, by the way, entirely appropriate.)

I hear from educators all the time how important it is for kids to develop a love of reading. And then I hear about things like this.

Here are a few thoughts, from someone who may not be an educator or a librarian or a literacy specialist, but from someone who does care about books and kids.

Don’t tell kids they are reading the wrong books. Don’t criticize their taste, even if their taste runs to series fiction or fantasy or graphic novels or any of the other books we adults like to sneer at. Reading is reading. Reading books that you adore is the absolutely best way (perhaps the only way?) to develop a true love for the printed word.

Don’t shut up the library or severely limit its hours and then complain that kids aren’t reading.

Don’t refuse to allow them any class time to read and then complain that they don’t prioritize reading.

Don’t give them tedious reading logs to fill out, making reading a painful chore.

Don’t act embarrassed or uncomfortable when kids in the throes of adolescence want to read about (gasp!) sexuality.

Don’t tell them when and what and how to read.

Just don’t.

New Chapter Book

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Mar 12, 2021 in Childhood, Children's Literature, Educators & Librarians | 0 comments

I’ve just finished draft five of a new chapter book that might be ready to send to my agent soon….I hope so, anyway.

This is one of my favorite scenes:

“What did Mr. Cleary say to you in the office after lunch recess?” Emily asked anxiously as they walked down the hallway.

“A lot about rules. Don’t all these rules get in the way of the education?” Rani asked.

Maybe a little bit, Emily thought. But she didn’t think she should say so.

“I could probably manage either the rules or the education,” Rani went on thoughtfully. “But not both.”

You Can Never Go Back

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Nov 21, 2019 in Childhood, Children's Literature, Uncategorized | 0 comments

So many wonderful lines in this amazing essay by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, I can’t keep myself from quoting:

I’d trade sex and booze and wisdom—all the best parts about being Grown—if I could have back [childhood]. Colors brighter, smells stronger, days bleeding on forever, and oh . . . reading. In childhood, there’s almost nothing to keep you from reading.

Kid’s books are where I personally learned most everything important about the world: About rape and sinister men from Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck; about eroticism from Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen; about feminism from P.L Travers’ maverick goddess Mary Poppins; about loss and the unceasing progress of time from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.

And lots more. Go read it!

You Can Never Go Back: On Loving Children’s Books as an Adult

More About Reading Logs

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson on Sep 11, 2019 in Childhood, Children's Literature, Educators & Librarians | 0 comments

It occurs to me that I never did tell you why Natalie Babbit agrees with me about reading logs. (You do know who Natalie Babbit is, don’t you? She wrote Tuck Everlasting. Go read it. Now.)

She wrote, not specifically about reading logs, but about the panic all around her (in 1986) that literacy skills were devolving. This is from her speech “Easy Does It.”

We are blaming our children’s poor reading and writing skills on television, an easy and pleasant machine, and also on the seductive and mysterious computer, which, I understand, is easy and pleasant too….There can be no question about the fact that these two inventions are changing our world. They are only the latest things to change our world, which has been in a constant process of change since its creation…. Still, I think it’s highly debatable that they are single-handedly responsible for our difficulties….It seems to me that it’s not so much the difficulties that are new as it is our expectations.

 

When I was a child in the good old days, my friends weren’t all word lovers, not all book lovers, not all good readers and writers….And all were growing up without television and computers. It seems to me as if we simply can’t expect a universally high level of enthusiasm about reading. That expectation seems new to me. And, unfulfilled, it carries with it for our teachers [and, I’d add, our kids] a heavy and inevitable load of blame. But there always was and always will be a percentage of children that finds reading stale, flat, and unprofitable….

 

And if we–you and I–go on believing that we can, should, and must graduate all children from high school and college into a lifetime of appreciative reading of literature, and a capacity for clear and graceful writing, we will, quite simply, break our hearts….

 

The only thing we can do, I guess, is fight fire with fire….Somehow [teachers] are going to have to find a way to make reading as seductive as its rivals–to make it, in other words, easy and pleasant. Because that, it seems to me, is the only thing that was better about the good old days. Books–for me, anyway–were easy and pleasant.

 

One of the things that makes books easy and pleasant was the practice of reading aloud. Almost any writing is easy and pleasant when it’s read aloud. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, read aloud to us every day for the last half hour, and she read aloud for pleasure, hers as well as ours. We weren’t tested on the books she read to us. We didn’t do projects or write to authors. We just relaxed and enjoyed it….

 

Some of the things I hear about that are being done with books in classrooms now make my blood run cold….Books have collected countless barnacles of peripheral stuff these days, and how can that do anything but turn reading into hard work?…

Use a little low cunning. Ease up on the projects, schedule time for reading aloud. Read aloud things that you really like, yourself. Everyone responds to a good story, and that is what good literature really is: a good story, well told.

 

I think we can go a long way if we take that route. Honey, you know, is actually good for us nutritionally. So is peanut butter. But they taste so good that we forget about the nutrition. Reading is like that. Or at least it should be. And could be. Maybe. All we can do is try.

This marvelous essay and many more are found in Barking With the Big Dogs: On Writing and Reading Books for Children.