Do you remember a summer night of your childhood with your sheets pulled up all the way under your nose in terror, in anticipation to hear the end of a bedtime story?
After a long day of fun in the sun, you’d think as soon as most kids hit the pillow, the lights would go out and they’d be sound asleep before you could say ‘sweet dreams,’ but this blog is here to remind you of your own childhood and to promote (bedtime) reading this summer.
I remember the thrill of reading the mystery book, Nancy Drew: The Whispering Statue, with a flashlight under my sheets so the light on my bedside table wouldn’t shine under my door, so my Mom wouldn’t know I was still awake.
No matter what age your child is (or how old you are) I want to encourage bedtime reading. Check out Hayner Library in downtown Alton on Belle Street and give your child their greatest gift this summer: a library card.
For your younger tots, pick out a few rhyming hardbacks with big pictures and large pages that they’ll want to turn themselves.
For those entering elementary and middle school, try starting with books in a series (as current members of the Harry Potter generation, we all saw what magic wonders a fiction series with a good vocabulary worked on literacy ratings). For poetry, have them try reading award-winning and coming-of-age-story/poetry book Love That Dog by Sharon Creech.
For yourself, go ahead, pick out something you’ll love to share with the whole family. Who knows, maybe Eragon or Katniss might just get your teenager to stop texting for awhile and get lost in a book on a summer night.
PARENTS (siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, and all babysitters of the world): Kids will stay up long enough to hear the end of that bedtime story.
One of the poets I recently interviewed wisely reminds us how important it is to read to our children. So go ahead, it’s summer, so pick out a good book, and stay up a little later.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
For the Words.
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