Someone to share things with

Hadley is reading pretty fluently these days.  There’ve been a few suggestions to encourage her to read those leveled books and I cringe a bit. That big number on the corner, on the back, and on the spine takes away from the story, doesn’t it?  Maybe it’s my aversion to numbers, but it concerns me that a leveled reader will teach my children that they are doing something rather than sitting with something for a time.  I worry that they will race to a higher number rather than put themselves in the story and hang out with its characters.  And in Harper’s case, I fear she will let a number define who she is and give up because she’s been told which books to read: the books she can read and not those that she’d like to try and read.

I suppose that sounds like a judgemental statement, but what I mean is that my girls are two different kinds of smart.  Hadley is precise in following directions and firmly believes that if she follows every step perfectly the end result will be exactly right.  Harper doesn’t want to follow directions.  She is OK not knowing how things will turn out.  She is confident that if she doesn’t understand something she can still move forward.

An example:  We have a craftbook called Thumbprint Stamps and it has pictures of all the different pictures you can make using your thumbprint as a base.  A pig, a princess, a flower, etc. On a day the girls were working on the craft, right away Harper stuck her thumb in the ink and made a pirate.  She did it again and made a race car. Then a fish and lion.  Over and over until the page was filled.  Meanwhile, Hadley quietly looked through all 52 pages, studying each one, thinking aloud about the differences between pictures, which ones looked too hard, which too easy.  In the end she decided on a baseball player; carefully following each step. When she was done, she was tired.  She needed a snack.  Harper on the other hand, was energized.  She went off to play with her dinosaurs.

The other day, I bought this book for Harper.

It’s a chapter book.  There are pictures throughout, but Harper’s three.  I knew it was silly but this is Harper’s favorite dinosaur.  And Lulu wants it for a pet.  I knew right away that Harper and Lulu would be friends if they gave each other a chance. So we read it together before she went to bed.  We got through three chapters and both Hadley and Harper loved it.  Harper went to sleep with the book and the next day as she played, she’d take a break looking through the book, studying the pictures, wondering whether Lulu will get her dino. When Harper wasn’t looking, Hadley would pick it up and read a few pages from it.  I could hear the effort it took for Hadley to read.  Deep breaths, pauses, eyes close to the page.  But she read with expression, knew when to change voices, and every so often she’d laugh at something in the book.

My girls greet a new concept differently.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want a number to change how they approach something. Actually, what I hope is that their difference will rub off on one another.  Like the other day, when Hadley read this at a park:

“There are many things to be done in the world and we all need someone to share them with,” says Captain Thomas Clifford Bland, Jr.

Indeed.