Setting Book Traps to Catch Readers

The book that had the most profound influence on my parenting was Mary Leonhardt’s “Parents Who Love Reading Kids Who Don’t.” No longer in print, its thesis is both simple and revolutionary: do whatever it takes to help your child become a reader. Her strategies include what I call "setting book traps": never say no if your kid asks you to buy a book; load up your library card with non-fiction titles of whatever your kids are interested in and prop them in front of the family’s cereal bowls at breakfast; let kids read as late into the night as they want. Read to them. Read with them. Make reading a centerpiece of the home. Leonhardt makes a great case for reading as the single skill that will serve them longest and best through their various life challenges: schooling, loneliness, new passions, understanding of others. As a reader myself, I wanted desperately to raise readers, and I did.

But my passion for turning young people into readers did not stop with my own children. It is the driving force behind the choices I make in my freshman English classroom. If I can get the right book in the hands of a reluctant or indifferent reader, she will experience engagement and emotional connection that she will go looking for again and again. Once she realizes that books deliver that feeling, ta-da! She’s a reader.

A stack currently next to my chair

This transformation is the greatest reward of my teaching. The question “Did I teach them anything?” laces itself through my summer reflections. In truth, we don’t know what our students learned at a depth to last into their adulthoods--or even sophomore year. Our school’s wrestling coach, when asked if he had a good season, said, “Ask me in 10 years when I see what kind of men they’ve become.” I feel that way about my teaching. If my students forget everything I taught them but are readers as adults, I will claim success, because they will know how to pick up a book for knowledge, clarification, pleasure and comfort. They’ll have at their disposal a means to find both answers and questions.

Over the next weeks, I’ll be blogging about strategies I use to push (I’m both sneaky and forceful) kids to read more than they thought they could.

But there are always a few that escape my traps. So as I share my ideas with you, I hope you will share your strategies with me as well. Next year I want to catch them ALL!