The Wonder of It All

When I was a young boy my classmates at school knew what I was going to be when I grew up before I knew.  When it was my turn to tell the class, they answered for me: "Scientist!  He's going to be a scientist!"  They reached this conclusion, I believe, by the following logic.  (1) I could read better than anyone else in the class.  (2)  Therefore I must be smart.  (3) The smartest people turn out to be scientists.  (4) Therefore he's going to turn out to be a scientist.  While their logic had some errors, their conclusion turned out to be correct.  I did become a scientist.

I don't believe the other kids knew that I had my first microscope and my first chemistry set before I was nine years old.  But they might've known about my "How-and-Why Wonder Books" if I brought one of them to school.  I got some of them from school book fairs, and some at the local shopping center in Levittown (later Willingboro), New Jersey.  I remember books on rocks, and coins, and dinosaurs, and stars.  No doubt reading these books sparked my curiosity and instilled a sense of wonder that would guide me as I grew up.

Thidwick

... is a moose.  The cognoscenti know Thidwick is a big-hearted moose.  Dr. Seuss tells the story of Thidwick and how the other animals took advantage of his hospitality.  It was one of our favorite books when we were little.

Growing up in a small house in Central Florida, there was never much room for storing things.  That didn't stop Mom and Dad from putting up shelves everywhere they could in the garage.  But it did mean they didn't save toys and other items from our childhood.  So I was quite surprised when - not long after mentioning to Dad how I wish I still had Thidwick - a large envelope showed up in the mail, containing the one and only Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose.  Dad had kept it all these years.  Maybe it was sentimental to him as well, since he used to read it to us.  Now it sits on the shelf waiting for the day I can read it to our granddaughter.

A protege of Dr. Seuss, P. D. Eastman, was the author of other books that were part of our family culture.  Our daughter Kendra loved Are You My Mother.  And Go, Dog, Go was another favorite.  In fact, when we see a bunch of people all headed in the same direction, we still say "they're going to a dog party."

Precocious Reading

Back on July 16 I posted about the positive effects of reading to very young children.  I just bumped into a blog that deals directly with this: "Raising Readers, Writers, and Spellers" at Psychology Today.

Imprinting

Imprinting in the psychological sense - not the publishing sense.

Parents are encouraged to read to their babies long before the little ones can talk or even show they're listening somehow.

So does it work? Consider the evidence ...

When our daughter Kendra was a newborn I placed her lying down in my lap and gently rocked her from side to side while I read the Bible out loud to her. When she was a toddler we took her with us to bookstores. When she was a teen (or tween?) I bribed her into reading the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. (I bribed her by promising her I would buy her more books.)

Now Kendra is a middle school English teacher and an author of several books (The Stone Garden; Reflection; Drachen), she reads more books and buys more books than I do (if that's possible), and a Narnia-themed library has led her to the right church.

Cue the Twilight Zone theme, please!

And yes, I'm very proud of her.