I know that I’ve said before that kids learning to read is akin to magic. I’m going to pull that analogy back out because watching reading happen is a wondrous, delightful thing to behold. I love that Big Leap, when a child goes from having to read with you to reading by themselves.
My six-year-old daughter had been trembling on that border line for a while, but a few weeks ago she finally made the big leap. We’d been tag-team reading The Unicorn’s Secret series by Kathleen Duey. She’d read the first and last pages of each chapter, and I would read the material in between. Most of the way through book 4, however, she said, “Mom, I want to finish this up by myself.”
I confess to feeling a little doubtful, but I said “Sure”, figuring that if she found it too challenging we could go back to tag-teaming it. So Miss M. took the book, read her way through to the end, then worked her way through books 5-8, interspersed with many “Mom, guess what happened!” exclamations. After that, there was no looking back. Miss M.’s world has opened up to include The Magic Treehouse, The Secrets of Droon, and all the picture books her younger brother is happy to let her read to him.
My little girl is reading. Reading! She made the Big Leap.
A related phenomenon to the Big Leap is what I call the Big Book. A child looks at a book way beyond his reading ability, one that even doting parents and encouraging teachers secretly believe he’ll never get through, and says, with a determined gleam in his eye, “This is the one. This is the book I’m going to read.” This can happen at any age, and you can’t predict when, or what that Big Book might be.
When Sir I. was five, and had been reading chapter books in the Magic Treehouse and the Flat Stanley series for a few months, we took a family vacation to Maine. Sir I. insisted on bringing Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain along, much to my (private) skepticism. And he read it. It was beyond what I thought he could read, but he read it and understood it and enjoyed it.
It was his Big Book.
My husband’s Big Book was The Neverending Story which he read because his parents and older sister had. He was about seven-ish at the time. Mine, at the age of four-ish, was Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (I have a hard time remembering my Big Book or my Big Leap because I was an early reader–I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t know how to read).
Do you remember your Big Leap? What was your Big Book? How about for your kids?
I don’t actually remember learning to read but I can very vividly remember looking at a word/picture book when I was probably about 3-4 and being frustrated because I couldn’t read the words. My Big Book, at about 6-ish or 7-ish was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I couldn’t understand some of them but they opened a whole fascinating world for me and I still love them.
I love how books of fairy tales are significant in so many people’s reading experience.
I was 4 years old and it was this picture book, tall and slim with a red side and a rainy picture and the main character on the front. It was about a mouse, and I loved that book. Can’t remember more than that now and some vivid images in my head of a couple pages and their pictures.
Have you ever tried to track it down?
Hmm… I wouldn’t know where to start. All I remember is the pictures and how big the font was!
Ask your parents and/or sibs?
I don’t remember when I learned to read, or my Big Book! Ugh, I wish my memory was better.
I’m glad I’ve been able to teach both of my girls to read, though. Like you, I think it’s pure magic. My oldest is now devouring chapter books each night. Her big leap was Junie B. Jones books. My youngest is just learning to read simple picture books, but, for both girls, I remember the “I did it myself” gleam in their eyes.
We read the Kathleen Duey unicorn series out loud and loved it. There is another series by her called The Faeries’s Promise — my oldest just finished the set and loved them too.
Miss M. got the first book of The Faeries’ Promise out of the library, but she found it hard going on her own (she declared the first two chapters were boring). DH read the first four chapter aloud to her tonight, after which she grabbed the book and went to read chapter 5 on her own. She’s still a new enough reader that she needs to get a sense of the story and setting and how character names are pronounced before she can get into a book on her own.
Picture books are great for newly-independent readers. They are written for *adults* to read to kids, so they are sophisticated in their vocabulary and structure while not intimidating child readers with text-dense pages. The pictures are a big lure. 🙂
Which other fantasy books have your girls enjoyed?
Rainbow Girl loves fantasy books, so that’s what we read together. We read the entire Fablehaven series, all of the Percy Jackson books, and now we’re reading the first book in the Septimus Heap series, Magyk. These are read-alouds, and very long, but it’s what we snuggle into every night before bed. Other read-alouds were The Fairy Chronicles series (though she probably could have done that one on her own) and a great book called Tuesdays at the Castle.
On her own, Rainbow Girl likes to read the Rainbow Magic Fairy books — there are tons of them, but they all end up having basically the same plot. Katie Kazoo books are set in the “real world” but have magic in them. She likes Fairy School Dropout, Princess School , and Candy Fairies as well. Other favorites that aren’t fantasy include the Horse Diaries, The Cupcake Diaries, and Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew. We read a lot!!
I can’t remember either – I so wish I could… I will have to go ask my mother!
Let us know if she remembers! 🙂
I *think* my Big Book was Johanna Spyri’s “Heidi” when I was 5, but I’m not sure because I was an early reader too, reading tonnes of Enid Blyton books. But yeah, I’m pretty sure Heidi was my first non-Blyton book. And I adored it. 🙂
Crumbs, can you tell I’m sleep deprived from the above????? (“I’m not sure… I’m pretty sure…”)
Agh!!!
Don’t worry about it! We’re pretty informal around here. 🙂
I still haven’t read Heidi (the unabridged version). I was thinking of doing it as a read-aloud this year for my olders.
If reading to your kids is what it takes for you to get around to Heidi, go for it. I found her pretty interesting when I discovered her in late elementary school. {Smile}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
The closest I can come to my Big Leap is my father’s statement that I didn’t start “reading seriously” until I was four. He means picking up a book and reading it to myself. Regularly. At that point, it was all picture books, which go so fast, I don’t know if anyone noticed the first one, and I don’t remember it myself. {apologetic smile}
As for the Big Leap, I’m not sure I really had one. I do remember when I ran into a word my little picture dictionary didn’t have “curator.” I graduated straight from that picture dictionary to an intermediate dictionary because the elementary dictionary didn’t have it. But to listen to my arents and grandma, the surprise wasn’t that I was reading the Dana Girls (a series related to Nancy Drew) at age seven. The surprise was that the elementary dictionary had never heard of museum curators. {SMILE}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
It’s funny, the things we remember. 🙂
Yes, it is funny whast we remember. {Smile}
I’d be tempted to think of that as my big step, except I suspect I got into the Dana Girls because some of my aunt’s old Nancy Drews and one Dana Girls book were at Grandma’s, and I liked their book enough better than Nancy Drew to want more. {pause}
I checked with Mom about this. She remembers me reading picture books, then suddenly reading more than just picture books, but she can’t remember the details. So it did happen, but my parents considered this fairly normal. That’s about what I figured. My parents can be positively unflappable about some things. {SMILE}
Mine was one of the “Troldepus” books, which were very popular in Scandinavia. It wasn’t so much me wanting to read it myself, since I’d been secretly reading them, but me calling my dad out on cheating and skipping paragraphs. :p
LOL! I totally cheat and skip paragraphs of books when reading aloud. Especially if the book is long, I’m tired, or the story is just plain annoying. Don’t be too hard on us parents. We don’t thrive on repetition the way our children do. 😀
What or who is Troldepus?
Aha! Busted! :p
And here’s a link to a site with a brief introduction of Troldepus, it doesn’t look as if the books have been translated to English, though.
http://users.skynet.be/fa023784/trollmoon/TrollWriters/files/e09e7a11906428b2259e81d058dd6fba-13.html
Cute! 🙂