Do you have a favorite memory from your childhood? Was it a moment with a special friend or grandparent? A trip with family? Or like me, is it just a warm feeling you get when you think about a favorite skill you learned and how it impacted you on the deepest level?
I was an early reader and once I began reading, I could not stop. I read every book I could get my hands on, spent all of my allowance on Scholastic Book Orders and stayed up late at night, reading under the covers, earning deep dark circles under my eyes. And this was all before I turned 7, lol.
However, the reading memory that evokes the sweetest feelings ever are not of a book I consumed cover to cover. Rather, it is the remembrance of my father reading aloud to my brother, sister and me that gives me the warmest childhood fuzzies.
I recently read “The Read-Aloud Family” by Sarah Mackenzie. The author makes a strong case for reading to your children, from infancy through their teenage years, citing evidence that doing so can prepare your children for academic success, teach them empathy and compassion and create a love for reading they will carry with them always. As this work was published in 2018, my father obviously had not studied all of the benefits of reading aloud to children, nor heard statistics pertaining to habits formed and goals achieved as a result.
I think Dad just liked to read. For pleasure, for knowledge, for inspiration. And he wanted each of us to fall in love with stories as well. I can’t recall many of the titles he read aloud to us at night before bedtime, but I vividly remember the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, of whom he was (is) a huge fan. Dad read them in chronological order, beginning with The Magician’s Nephew and ending with The Last Battle. (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published first but in the story timeline, The Magician’s Nephew predates the former.) It’s the funniest thing…I can still remember the voice he used whenever Mr. Tumnus (Lucy’s fawn friend) had a line to speak.
This memory of being read aloud to decades earlier, made me want to read to my children. And I did, maybe not through their teenage years but certainly through middle school. I hope they have fond memories of our time together reading. Today, I sometimes read to my children’s children, cuddling their little warm toddler bodies on my lap, or through a Zoom call, holding the illustrated pages up to the screen so they can add a picture to their already formed imagination of the scene. I hear my own voice evoking emotion or attempting silliness to make them laugh and keep them engaged. And it’s a good thing. I hope I can read aloud to someone special for a very long time.
“I discovered that the wisdom of the world, and a great deal of its folly also, is to be found in the pages of books…” C.S. Lewis