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Good books enable us to think
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WHEN I was a child, my mother took me along everywhere she went. I was usually the only kid present, so my nose was always buried in a book. As I grew older, my interest in reading waned until my identity as a “reader” disappeared. What happened?
Before becoming an educator, I came to believe I wasn’t one of those people who was a “reader.” As texts became more complex, I lacked the strategies needed to navigate and comprehend them fully. So I lost interest. For young children, it is indeed important to focus on decoding, reading accuracy and fluency. But I would like to suggest that from the beginning, the most important idea we teach kids is that reading is actually thinking.
While it’s easy to agree that reading is important, getting our kids to love reading and sustaining that love is more challenging. That’s where Goldilocks comes in. Remember the porridge, the chair and the bed? It had to be “just right.” The same applies to the books our children read. Though they may read all the words on every page and even summarize the who, what, where, when and why, essential and true comprehension lies in growing your own opinions and ideas to make meaning out of what you read. In today’s information sharing era, we have unlimited access to texts — texts that interest us, are engaging, and most importantly, ones in which we can think.
The indispensable habit of reading and thinking must be modeled consistently for our children. We must demonstrate how reading is a portal that transports us into the minds and lives of others and into experiences beyond our own. Reading stories helps us think about a character’s behavior and motivations so we can better understand and empathize with people. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, reading allows us to study themes across history and learn lessons without facing the hardship ourselves. When we read, our minds, hearts and lives are changed.
Whether you’re still reading to your child, listening to them read, or just reading the same books with them, make reading come alive by thinking and talking about it. As Cornelius Minor, staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project think tank says, “Reading leads to thinking, and there can be no human progress without thinking.”
(Patti Lee is Middle School instructional coach of Concordia International School Shanghai.)
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