If you know me, this won’t surprise you, but I treasure reading to my kids each night as they go to bed. There’s a connectedness in reading at bedtime I can’t seem to scrape together during the day. It’s also one-on-one time with each of them, something each of them would like to have, but not necessarily like the other one to have.
While, I love reading to them, neither one of them has shown a great interest in reading beyond the mechanical, “I guess I should learn how to do this.”
Then, Friday morning, my daughter made me cry.
“Do you want to know what we’re reading in class?” she asked as we were driving to school.
I told her yes, and words and ideas burst forth from her in ways I’ve never seen in relation to a book. She turned around mid-sentence to tell her brother he’d probably like the book too “because there’s space in it”.
She pulled it from her backpack to show me the cover. Then, started flipped through pages to find something. Once, there, she determinedly read a sentence aloud. This was the sentence she’d used in her writing about the book, she told me, pulling out her school work to show me where she’d written that same sentence.
“And, I said yard was the most important word in the chapter because, well, the whole thing is about the yards, so that’s definitely the most important.”
She talked about this book for nearly 10 minutes. I’m grateful she didn’t stop to ask questions because I was trying to drive and hold together how proud I was for those 10 minutes.
I didn’t hold it together later. Sitting at my desk, I emailed her entire teaching team, tears running down my cheeks, to let them know what happened. These are the people who have made her feel safe, capable, and smart. She knows she’s protected in the school, and that gives her brain the security it needs to start to learn. What a remarkable thing. What remarkable people.
She likes a book.