Questions re: choosing challenging readings

One thing I find is if when my kids are suppose to be doing there reading they are looking around, flipping the pages to play or just looking dazed I have to ask myself why??  Is it just a bad day or is it something more.  We have had to put 2 books away cause they were not working and then in return the boys were not reading.  So we kept going till we found something better.  Now they are flying through there books!!! YEPPIE  Good luck. Misty

I agree with everything said already, with one caveat.  It can sometimes be that it is the more challenging book that gets the better narrations.  I used to sometimes be afraid of the “challenging” books, putting them off until later and choosing easier books–and I got boring, short, uninventive narrations.  When I gathered up the courage to try a few more challenging books, suddenly I got much, much better narrations.  It took me a while to figure out why this was so, but I think I have it now.  🙂  The “too-easy” books were often not thought about and reflected on in between readings.  We read it, they narrated it, that was it.  Those meatier books, they were “living with” in between readings.  This was reflected in the quality of their narrations.

I would never want to say you must force a child to read something very difficult that totally frustrated them.  However, I feel there is a place for more difficult material.  It won’t hurt to occastionally just say to your children “This one is really frustrating you, let’s put it aside for now and think about returning to it another time.”  But as you mentioned, we don’t want our children just giving up every time they run into something that doesn’t come easily.  It is worthwhile to come up with some “coping strategies” for more difficult reading.  One is to read the tougher material aloud and discuss it more than you usually would.  This is what we do with, say, Plutarch.  We unravel it together.  Preparing the reading is much more important with this sort of material–it’s worth it to spend a few minutes in advance looking up difficult words, diagramming out a very tough sentence, making a simple outline, or something to keep your thoughts together.  Look up those mythological and historical references you don’t recognize, etc.  Obviously you can’t do all this with twenty readings a week and stay sane, but you could do it for a few.  Teach your children, as they become older, to do the same thing.  Yes, we want to encourage one reading with attention, but some subject matter, one reading is just not enough.  Some books your child is going to need to learn the skill of forging through difficult material, and for that, it is worthwhile to pass through once, for “discovery”, looking things up as you go, and then pass through again for understanding. 

I think of it as the Danny method.  Has anyone else read Chaim Potok’s The Chosen?  There is a brilliant boy named Danny who decides as a teenager he wants to read Freud in the original German, but just can’t get through it with understanding, even though he has a photographic memory.  (NO, I do not recommend his choice of reading material for our kids–it’s the method that struck me) So what he does next is to keep a German dictionary and a psychiatric dictionary next to him and work through it slowly, word by word, and then read it for understanding.  If our kids can do the same, they’ll be well prepared for life–no one wants to read EVERYTHING this way.  But boy, I wish I’d known how to do this already before I hit graduate school.  🙂