In my years of reading books to ankle biters my young wards have fallen into one of two categories: prodigious or retarded. Well ... that may be a severe assessment, but I do mean 'retarded' in the objective sense that they lag their peers and they're enrolled in a reading program to help them get up to speed and perhaps save them from a life of ( Read more... )

mishak's entry about his escapades with his Little Brother remind me that it's been a while since I posted updates on GrommetReading Adventures. Suffice to say that the TotRodder graduated from the program, advancing into fourth grade where, presumably, he would be able to fend for himself in navigating the school library and making teachers squirm with ( Read more... )

oh ... and on the topic of brain damage ... this happened a week ago:

In recognition of National Poetry Month, the TotRodder and I were reading some excerpts from that chestnut of childish limericks, Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. There's a poem in there involving a guy who gets a railroad spike driven through his head, and there's ( Read more... )

It's a slowish reading session today. The TotRodder picked out a book about sea mammals, and I was reading a passage about killer whales, trying to sound lurid and menacing to get his attention, but his eyes aren't on the book or me or his lunch. They're just scanning the room, twitching between pictures of presidents up on the wall of the ( Read more... )

I had to leave the LittleReaderThatCould after our company moved to the suburbs. The reading program is only supposed to be an hour long and round trip travel time to and from Cambridge would've easily eaten up most of that. So, instead, our company was re-assigned to another public school in the town next door. The program coordinator asked us ( Read more... )

"Hello, Mr. Cris"
"Hello, LittleReader. Did you have a good Halloween?"
"Yup, uh-huh. I was a ninja."
"Did you go trick or treating?"
"Yeah, we went to Belmont. Because rich people live there, and they've got better candy."

He's the best first grader ever.

There's a small library growing in our mailroom. It's filling with dog-eared copies of The Magic Treehouse1, WhereThe Sidewalk Ends and Where The Wild Things Are. Some of them have been donated by co-workers with children who've outgrown these books, others have been bought by my peers in the reading program who, in a burst of enthusiasm, raided ( Read more... )

On the way over to the school, my coworkers and I were talking about why we were volunteering for this program to read to first graders. Many of them were married, and their motivations were similar -- young parents either training themselves to read to kids, or old hands at the job, who liked doing it when their son and daughter was 3, and didn't ( Read more... )