Thursday, December 8, 2011

Read to me, Daddy

Alice Ozma's new book, The Reading Promise, is available now in our library and if you've never read to your child, spouse, grandchild, or a friend, this book smacks you in the face with that simple notion. Read to me. Read to your child. Read to your husband, wife, lover, partner, elderly parent, your students, read to whomever will listen. That is the promise I made to myself all my life, first as a child reader, a college student, a teacher, a mother, a lover, and finally, a librarian. And that promise to read is the core message of this book. The author's father, a school librarian, begins a streak of reading aloud to his daughter as a challenge at first, and then it becomes a way of life for both of them. They read every night for over 9 years, until the day she arrived at college. The story is witty, sad, real-life, and so promising and hopeful.

 Reading aloud is a lost gift we can share with another. Instead of sending an e-mail, a text, a poke, a wink, and a phone call, read to me. Read to your spouse. Read in the car on trips. Read after dinner to your family. Reading is that gift you can give freely at this time of year to your children on the night before Christmas. I read "A Christmas Carol" to my own children at Christmastime. There are thousands of choices of books to read as a tradition in your own family. Every night before bed, Alice Ozma was entertained and transported to new worlds by the sound of her father's reassuring voice. They read hundreds of books together. It is a beautiful tribute in a very technologically bent world. I read to my own children every night until they preferred to read on their own. I secretly wished they had continued allowing me to read to them, until they, too, left for college. I so wanted to! But I introduced them to the possibilities of reading and so they had the encouragement they needed to run ahead without me, seeking their own magical worlds and ideas through books. Whether you read for just a few precious years or until your child leaves home for college or career, the experience, the closeness, the magic, the lifelong gift extends beyond that time you spent together. It made my children better students, better writers, better readers, better thinkers and my reading promise to them creates a ripple of reading to the people they have become.  (Posted Dec. 8, 2011)

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