By Kitty Felde
Learning how to read doesn’t mean that we immediately possess the vocabulary and skills to read everything. At least not yet.
Library Media Specialist Jill Schechter has students who “look at the bright, shiny sparkly cover and go and pick up a book that is much too hard for them.” She uses the “5 Finger Rule.” She opens the book and asks the student to read a page to her. “See how many words on the page you don’t know,” she tells them, “and if you don’t know more than five words, that’s not a good book for you.”
Some argue that reading is a process of making sense out of the whole paragraph. But for a brand new reader, a paragraph of unfamiliar words can stomp on that new-found enthusiasm for reading.
So what do you do if the child is wedded to that particular book?
Take it home. Read it together. And have a backup book that you know they can read. Reading shouldn’t make us feel stupid. It should inspire us to pick up the next book. And the next. And the next…
Kitty Felde is author of the forthcoming middle grade mystery “Snake in the Grass.” It takes us backstage at the Congressional Baseball Game as our 10-year-old detective investigates who’s leaving snakes in the gym bags of lawmakers.