Let’s Read a Book! Let’s Read Another One!

I’ve been going back to the elementary school near my church for Reading Club again. I just have one girl now, whom I’ve had for the past two years, also. They may add a couple of more kids, but for now, it’s just the two of us, which is nice, because she gets to read more. We chat while she’s eating her lunch. Sometimes I make hangman games on a white board for her; she can eat while figuring out the word. Then, we read.

The first book she chose was about Clara Barton, a brave woman she’d learned about in class. Then we started a Dr. Seuss tongue twister book, which was pretty challenging, because it was made of nonsense (but rhyming) words, and it didn’t really make any sense. Then, last week, was “Game Week,” when card games are available for us to use for a change of pace. She chose Uno, and she plays with her family. A lot. She knew the rules and the strategy and won two out of three games.

This week, I brought a book that I’d seen advertised, A Stone Sat Still, and I had checked it out from the public library. It’s a new book from a writer and illustrator who won a Caldecott Award for the book They All Saw a Cat. It describes how different animals see parts of a cat and think what they saw was a part of a plant or a toy, and so on, until the reader realizes that all those parts belonged to a cat.

The premise of the new book is similar to the Cat one. Here, the stone is described with a variety of adjectives, like high, low, rough, smooth; and nouns, such as a kitchen, a maze, a map. My Book Club girl read all the pages, easily recognizing most of the words and being able to sound out the others. She read it all, but wasn’t quite as entranced by it as I was.

I turned back to the beginning and talked through it.

“How can this same stone be high AND low?” She realized that to a snail, the stone might be high. But to an elephant, it could seem low. We went through the book again, page by page, with her explaining how the different descriptors could all be true, depending on what animal was nearby.

“Now,” I said. “Let’s think about some words that are true about you.”

“You are a daughter. You are a cousin (and I knew this for sure because a younger boy came up to her in the library for a hug, and she said it was her cousin). You are a granddaughter. You are a student. You are a friend (and this is obvious to me, as most every kid we walk by says ‘Hi’ to her). You are a cheerleader (some guys in her family are part of a football team that plays on the weekends). You are many different things. Lots of words describe you.”

“And I’m a basketball player!” she said. “And,” she said shyly, “I think I’m going to be an aunt.”

“And,” she said … (and I am not making this up) … “I’m a reader.”

It just doesn’t get any better than that.

We needed a few weeks to read the Clara Barton book, because it was a biography and had many pages and many, many words. And, we read the Stone book twice. We’re on a roll!