Three Doctors

The Power of Books

I cannot stress enough how powerful books can be. I started the children on books when they were babies. I got them the books with hard pages, so even if they put the book in their mouths, they could not hurt themselves or the book. I read to them often, especially making sure I read to them every night before they went to bed. They would usually have the book they wanted read that night picked out and ready to go.

The children had a game they played when they were two. They sat in front of the huge stack of children’s books I had for them and paged through them one at a time until they had looked through the whole stack. One night I was reading to our baby (this would have been before he was two years old), and he said to me, “Me, do that.” I was not sure at first what he meant, and then I realized he wanted to read the words himself. Now I have my degree in education, but I am trained to teach high school. If he had wanted me to discuss Julius Caesar with him, that I could have done. This I had no idea how to pull off. I could read when I was four years old because of my older sister. My sister would go to school (grade 1), and when she returned, we would play school. She was the teacher, and I was the student. She taught me everything she learned that day in school. At four years of age, I could read. When I went to kindergarten, my teacher saw me reading books to all the other children, but she simply assumed I had been read those books at home and memorized them. One day when we arrived in class, our kindergarten teacher had written a story on the blackboard. I put up my hand and asked the teacher if she would like me to read it to the class. I did, and she was shocked.

This would not work for our children, as they did not have an older sibling in school. It was up to me to figure this out. I went out and bought them some workbooks. They included everything from the alphabet to phonics to colors to shapes. Every day my babies and I sat and worked through a few pages of every book. I taught them how vowels have two sounds, a long sound and a short sound. I taught them what the letters looked like and how to form them. I taught them there were capital letters and small letters. I taught them the names and sounds of each letter. I taught them the colors and how they were formed. They knew if you mixed blue and red you got purple. I got out the crayons and let them practice forming colors. They absolutely loved it! They could not learn enough. I was limited in the amount of time I could sit and teach each of them individually because the other children also needed my attention, but I tried to keep the children learning. When they entered kindergarten, they were reading really well.

I felt it was not fair to teach one child to read by age four and not give all the other children the same opportunity. So, I bought these same workbooks for all the children before they turned two and spent each day working with them. They soaked up knowledge like little sponges. They loved the special time I spent with them as I taught them. When Danielle entered grade 1, her teacher came to me and asked me if I would be all right with her having Danielle tested to see just what reading level she was actually at. I agreed, and the tests she gave showed Danielle was reading at a grade-8 level. The teacher started putting together much more difficult work to challenge Danielle more. This was the only teacher who tried to challenge any of my children.

All my children were reading well by the time they were four, and this head start I gave them academically has stayed with them throughout their years of education. Children do so much better when they are good at something. I made sure my children were good at reading before they ever entered school, and because of this, they have always enjoyed learning. At one point I told Danielle I was going to have to sign her up with reader’s anonymous because she would not stop reading.

You must give your children the materials they need to keep reading. I found a library where the librarians labeled Christian books with a cross sticker, making them easier to find. I took the children there often, and although we did take out a few picture books, the children consistently read novels.

To teach my very young children how to turn the pages of a book, I would say, “Beep,” whenever we came to the end of a page. Then I stopped reading, and the child had to turn the page for me to continue reading. I never turned the pages myself, and my young babies learned how to turn the pages of a book for themselves.

I always read my children a story at bedtime. When they were four and could read, I found ways to get them reading more by making a game out of it. For example I opened the book, and there were words to read on the left page and on the right. Some pages had more to read than others. I let the children pick which pages they would read and which I would read. They always took the page with the least amount of reading. I teased them with “You gave me more words!” They laughed, thinking they had really pulled one over on me because I had to read more words than they did. In reality, however, they were reading more than they could ever have realized as this went on night after night. They loved it, and I really ended up only reading half the story; they read the other half. Their reading abilities were incredible, and they were having fun in the learning process.

When the children turned two, I taught them to sing a Christmas carol. They would be able to get up in church and sing a song with two verses and two choruses by memory. Adam learned to recite the first twenty verses of Luke, chapter 2, and he got up in church at the Christmas concert and recited this in front of everyone. Adam and Joshua memorized scripture for children’s clubs at church, and they won trophies for their memorization. There was no limit to their ability to learn.