Today was a moment like that in our house. I had planned to be reading difficult and disparate texts to my kids aloud for at least the next 3 years. It is a way that we have stretched the vocabulary and comprehension capabilities of our kids since they were very little. If they did not want to read a book when they were younger, I would take it and read it aloud while they colored or drew or stared out the window. This year I am reading out of between 10 and 12 books to them each week (2 or 3 a morning). The chapters in these books are important to take as a whole, and not distributed across multiple weeks, in order that we can tease out the argument or point of the author and discuss its validity. Given that the kids are older and more sophisticated, we are reading books that are more complex and so the chapters in each book are longer and often require an hour or more to read aloud.
This morning I got a few pages into a chapter in Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 To The Present: 500 Years Of Western Cultural Life” about the rise of the artist as a force in culture, and my daughter stopped me.
“Aargh, you read so slowly! I really like this book, but I would rather read it on my own.”
So I handed over the book and sat quietly while she spent the next half hour chuckling, expounding, and reading aloud sections of the text to her brother and me. When she was done, she told me she liked it so much that she wants to read that chapter again, although not right away.
Our morning routine will now need to change. The kids will be reading a chapter of this text, and quite possibly all the books, each week and we will get together in the mornings to discuss and share our ideas. Change is good, even if it is a little sad to leave behind a developmental stage you really loved watching. There are many reasons that my kids were ready for the shift – and many of the supporting pieces were put in place purely accidentally. Looking back I realize they both needed enough historical, literary, and cultural knowledge to understand context and references. They also needed enough understanding of language (Old English, English, and Latin) to understand the vocabulary in many of these books. Also I only now realize that by reading to them, my kids gained an understanding for phrasing that can be quirky depending on the author. For example, Winston Churchill definitely was no friend to the comma, Alexander Hamilton goes through a lot of winding up before making his point, and Barzun’s writing is very, very French (not surprising since he was born in France). It was only by reading this and many, many, many more authors to my kids aloud that they are able to sit and read without getting lost in the peculiarities of a given author – not something I planned in advance.
And so, this morning I relieved the joy I held while watching my little girl take her first unaided steps at the zoo as I watched her take the reigns of her own education in full.
Sometimes I just wish my kids would give me the front row seat to moments of magic a little less often.
