Notes From the Reading Nook: July 27
Inspiring kiddos to pick up all the books you've carefully left around the house
Hi there! Happy Tuesday. We have made it into another week. Cheers to us! Gold medals all around just for showing up🏅
If you’re new here, welcome. Thanks for taking a chance on another message in your inbox. If you’re curious about what this is (or who I am), you can read more here. This is a kind of a weird time in my newsletter as I just announced that I am adding paid subscriptions, but I hope you’ll stick around and see what it’s like…
Hey! Do you know…
This is your last weekly Notes From the Reading Nook — starting next week you’ll only receive this little digest from me once a month unless you choose a paid subscription. (If you missed the announcement where I explained this decision, you can read it here.)
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What we’re reading
City Green by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan (I reviewed this is my special edition on summer this year)
What Happened to You? by James Catchpole
Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder (I am in love with this book and will definitely be reviewing it sometime soon)
Jenny and the Cat Club by Esther Averill
📫 Questions from you
I received this one on my @canweread Instagram account (which I find incredibly draining and detrimental to my energy for writing here so have stopped posting at least for the time being) from my long-time internet friend Rebecca, who was the very first supporter of this newsletter, way before it was a concrete idea, much less an actual newsletter, but rather just a nebulous desire floating around in my head.
This was the image I posted:
And Rebecca left this comment:
While they constantly ask to be read to, my kids don’t pick up books and look at the pictures on their own like this; how do you drive this behavior? Question for a future newsletter!
💌 Dear Rebecca,
Here it is, the future newsletter in which I answer your excellent question.
My answer is pretty simple: I offer my children lots of new books.
Now, I don’t mean “new” as in brand new, not used, from a new bookstore — I merely mean new-to-them.
There are a couple ways to do this, which I’m going to break down into sections of questions to help you think about not only the books you’re offering your kiddos but how and when — two components of driving this kind of behavior that I believe are even more important than the titles you choose.
Where do you keep your books, and how do your kids access them?
This is a question I addressed, using my own home as an example, in the January issue of (How) Can we read?, which I know you know was all about storing books and reading nooks — a topic that applies completely here.
Walk around your house in your mind and think about every place — every single place — where you keep books. How are they organized? How accessible are they to your children? Importantly, can they see the covers of the books?
I’ve shared on more than one occasion, especially on @can_we_read, about my front-facing bookshelf — one of the Help-Yourself bookstands from Lakeshore Learning (this is the one I have; I got it off Craigslist for half that price) — which I wish I had bought the moment I knew I was pregnant with my first child, it has been that useful and impactful in our home.
But before I had this magical bookshelf, I had other ways of creating what the stand is intended to do, which is present titles in front-facing way:
Often I just propped picture books up along a blank space of wall or against a large bookcase, especially when my children were still crawling or spent more of their time on the floor. Now I do this on occasion against the back cushions of one of our couches (I’ve found this to be especially easy when I get home from a solo library trip with some new kids titles and don’t have the bandwidth to rearrange the front-facing shelf — I just prop 5-6 new books up on the couch and leave them for my children to find on their own. 9 times out of 10, the next time I walk by that room I spy a child standing next to the couch or sitting on the windowsill (see the photo that prompted your question), paging through what I’ve left.
I’ve also used gutters from the hardware store — you can see a clear photo of that setup in our basement, again in that January issue of (How) Can we read? or see them in the background of the rather blurry shot below (what amazes me about this picture is how few books there are compared to now 😂 ). These cost $20 and my husband’s labor in cutting them down to size for me. There are a million directions online. Do they look like rain gutters? Actually, no. You have to get right up on top of them to really realize that’s what they are. Do they work? Yes. They are sturdy — they can hold surprisingly heavy books — and hold up to a lot of abuse.
I have also offered books using small tabletop easels (the kind that are intended to hold up a book/hold open a cookbook, etc) in unexpected places — usually underneath the visual calendar we’ve used for years, on top of an antique wine crate (see below).
Changing up the spots where my kids expect to find books gets their attention. Most of the time they are willing to stop when they walk by and look at whatever I’ve left there.
Other places I have left books for them to find: on their pillows when they come home from daycare/school/a sleepover at Grandma’s, on their placemats to be discovered in the morning (especially helpful if I am hoping not to be awake at that time), on their carseats, on their desks.
I just keep giving them books, constantly, in whatever ways I can think of.
(This is where I want to repeat, again, that these are not new books in the sense that I have gone out and bought them for this purpose — sometimes they are books that I have recently bought, because I am constantly buying books and there are always new-to-them titles somewhere in our house, but more often they are books from my storage shelves that they perhaps haven’t seen in awhile, or books from the library. It is entirely possible to create a constant flow of books in your home without spending a dime. I do spend dimes — many, many dimes — but that’s because I want to, not because it’s necessary.)
How often do you refresh your books?
Beyond where you keep your books is the issue of how fresh they are to your children. Another way of saying this is, how often do you rotate out the books on offer (do you rotate out the books on offer)?
I’ve found that my own appetite for doing this depends entirely on my children’s — i.e., when they no longer seem interested in the titles on the front-facing shelves, if they are not bringing them to me to read, if I don’t catch them sitting and looking through them on their own, then I know it’s time for a refresh.
Some areas need this more often (the Lakeshore shelf is by far the most demanding, as it is their most-utilized reading nook, so I try to add 2-3 new titles there at least bi-weekly and change out the whole thing every 4ish weeks), some far less so (the gutter shelves require far less attention; I add a few new titles whenever I come home from a book sale but change out both shelves entirely only every 3 months or so). The distinction here is that these spots dedicated to motivating my kids to pick up books and look at them are not storage areas — they are meant to be changed and changed frequently.
Thinking of these areas kind of like store window displays, the purpose of which is to entice customers to stop and look and hopefully come inside and buy something, has helped me utilize them — sometimes I actually put “refresh such-and-such shelf” on my to-do list, a little because I am neurotic, yes, but more because I see it as my job to foster a love of reading in my home, and this is one way I do that.
What kind of books are you offering?
I know you are an involved and diligent parent, so you know what your kiddos are interested in at every age and stage: use that information! Look up all the books about frogs, fairies, riding bikes, the weather cycle, whittling, Vikings, baking cookies, insert-whatever-here in your library system, put a pile on hold, and leave them in a place your reader/s can’t miss. Do this again and again and again.
I often provide my children books to assist in/be part of their pretend play — if I notice that they’ve been playing superheroes for a week straight, superhero books appear in our house. We have a nature table stocked with field guides that they regularly use to play adventurers — the books go into their little backpacks alongside binoculars and magnifying glasses and they head outside to do whatever adventurers do, and when I take a peek to see what they are up to, sometimes I find they are facedown in one of those books for whatever reason their play requires. I offer these books without a word and without any expectation of use — if they do get used, great, if not, NBD.
Of course, changing seasons as well as upcoming holidays and events are also opportunities for providing enticing reading material. Not that birthdays need more hype when one is little but I’ve ratcheted up the anticipation, for better and worse, a few days ahead of birthdays by leaving a pile of birthday books around — something that is all the more special and worth-sitting-down-for because those titles only come out for a week, twice a year.
This month’s issue of (How) Can we read? was all about what I call “looking books,” which may also be relevant here.
What really matters
My 4yo is much more inclined toward picking up a book and looking at it on her own than my 7yo (as I was looking through my photos for this behavior I was struck by the fact that the ratio of shots is something like 4:1 in favor of my youngest, and I don’t think it’s because I took an unequal number of pictures but rather because this is evidence that it appeals to one more than the other). Maybe there is something there about learning preferences, reading preferences, how each processes information, how curious they are — I don’t know.
This is to say, the most important part of your question wasn’t the question at all but rather the part where you mentioned that your children are “constantly asking to be read to.” Don’t overlook that. That matters a whole heck of a lot.
Take a look at how you’ve got things set up in your home, try a few new ways of offering books to your children, but remember that you are doing a great job raising readers whether your kids end up picking up books and looking at them on their own or not.
Keep reading to them, and then read some more.
(And: thanks for believing in my vision for this thing long before I figured out what it was or how to bring it into being; thanks for championing it now that it’s an actual something. You’re the best.)
Love,
Sarah
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