Reading Three Ways

By Martha V. Parravano

In the March/April 1997 Horn Book I wrote about my daughter Emily’s response to picture books (“Rumpeta-ing through Reading: Picture Books for the Very Young”) when she was a toddler — how rewarding reading together was; how much fun our joint participation was; how important rhythm and repetition and child-centered situations were in books for the very young. Ah, yes — those were the days. A book-loving parent sharing books with a book-loving child — sheer bliss, an idyll, a Sunday drive in the country. But it’s four years down the road, and we’ve since hit a few bumps along the way.

Contrary to expectations, Emily's passionate attachment to picture books has not translated into a passionate attachment to independent reading. She’s in second grade now, and completely uninterested in reading chapter books. When she has to, for school, she reads a few pages and then counts how many are left till the end of the chapter, when she can stop. It’s a chore for her, not a pleasure.

It’s not that she has trouble with decoding; she learned to read early and apparently by osmosis. She loved easy readers — all the James Marshall Fox books, Cynthia Rylant’s Henry and Mudge, JeanVan Leeuwen’s Oliver and Amanda, Steven Kellogg’s Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind Crockett, and many others. And you should hear her read picture books aloud — picture books with sophisticated language, meant for an adult to read to a child. She sails right through sentences such as “Wizzil had been so thoroughly cleansed by the crystal-clear water that all her vicious nastiness was whirled away downstream” (from the spectacular new William Steig/Quentin Blake title Wizzil [Farrar]). And she can pore for hours over nonfiction books on subjects — such as dogs! — that interest her. But the joys of reading a chapter book by herself — sustained reading of stories as a solitary experience — have so far eluded her. And yes — I have tried reading chapter books aloud. Mrs. Pigglewiggle and sequels were a hit, and so was The BFG, but for most other books she squirms and searches for the few illustrations most chapter books contain and is just plain bored. Hardly the idyllic picture of a reading experience. So for now our family reading is done as a threesome: Emily, me, and my younger daughter, Eleanora, now four.

Eleanor is the polar opposite of her sister — physical rather than verbal (not speaking until her third year), more reserved than social. She loves books just as much as Emily did at that age, but, just as she is a very different person, she is a very different reader. Whereas Emily was a full participant in our picture-book sessions — entering the world of the book vocally (imitating animal sounds, etc.) and with movements (making her own hair stand straight up to match the falling-out-of-the-boat girl’s in Mr Gumpy’s Outing) — Eleanor is an absorber, a listener.

As our threesome consists of one adult, one child of reading age who loves to be involved in the reading process, and one child who has difficulty speaking but is good at listening, I thought it would be a problem finding books that would work for all of us. But it’s actually been a wonderful combination. Emily is happy: she’s sharing the experience, which is clearly one of the things she likes best about reading, and she’s participating, often doing much of the reading aloud. And for Eleanor, picture books have provided not only pleasure and family togetherness but also have marked milestones in her slow-to-develop speech.

One of the first books we latched onto together, when Eleanor was about two, was Simms Taback’s There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Viking). The humor and exaggeration in the illustrations are exactly on-target for both children (for instance, they both giggled over the burp on the “she swallowed a bird” spread). It worked particularly well for us because it works on multiple levels. For younger readers, like Eleanor, there is of course the simple, toddler-appropriate song, delightful in the silliness of its contents and the repetition in its form (“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly . . . I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she’ll die”). Emily and I tickled her whenever we got to the spider (“that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her”), and she was absolutely fascinated by the increasing size of the lady as she consumed ever-larger and ever-more-unpalatable animals. You just never know what children are going to fixate on, and Eleanor was for some reason particularly interested in determining where the lady’s feet were (pointing giddily toward each other? stretched impossibly far apart, poking out from opposite edges of the lady’s petticoat?) on each spread.

Meanwhile, thanks to the sophistication of Taback’s illustrations, which include lots of extra text, the book allowed older sister Emily to be a full participant. She pored over all the jokes (the recipe for spider’s soup, the poster for a lost dog “last seen with old lady,” etc.) and was the official reader of all the jazzy rhymes-with-die comments that punctuate every other spread: “But it’s only a fly”; “She’ll leave us high . . . and dry”; “I’d rather have ham on rye.” All except one, that is. At that point Eleanor was still using words sparingly, if at all, in her daily interactions. Stringing words and sounds together is still difficult for her; then she was mostly employing gestures to communicate, and, if speaking, using one word at a time. But Simms Taback’s There Was an Old Lady gave her a gift: one of the rhyming asides, “OH, my!” with its open vowels and sole consonant, was a whole sentence she could say herself, and relish. Each and every time the three of us rollicked our way through the book, Emily read “I think I’ll cry” and “She gulped it out of the sky” but let Eleanor take over for “OH, my!”

David Shannon’s No, David! (Blue Sky/Scholastic) was another book that had it all — appeal in content to both children and a verbal role for each. Although it doesn’t combine sophisticated elements with a simple trajectory the way that the Taback book does, it nonetheless speaks to children at multiple ages. Others have written eloquently about the effectiveness of Shannon’s seemingly childlike art: how the mother is introduced as strained patience personified, all sharp elbows and sharp, angrily-tapping foot, and presented as a faceless (literally) authority figure; how David is presented as almost predatory in his mischievousness, with his separated, pointy teeth, pointed collar, and sharp pointy fingers; and how all softens at the end to round head, round eyes, rounded collar, and round encircling arms. The appeal of the book’s content is similarly complex. It’s a book that while being extremely funny and entertaining also captures an essential truth about the parent-child relationship: conflict happens. Kids misbehave; parents lose their tempers. What gets everyone through is the knowledge that, underneath all the chaos, there is love. So we laughed at David’s antics (and got happily grossed-out at his mouth full of food and his finger up his nose) and shouted lustily along with the mother’s exclamations (“That’s enough, David!” “Settle down!” “Stop that this instant!”), and in the end we got a reminder of what it’s all about.

The book’s enormous energy also made it exhilarating to read aloud (how many books do you get to shout your way through?). Emily would usually read it to us. But Eleanor, without even trying, could read some of the first few pages (“No, David! / No, David, no! / No! No! No!”) herself — no being, of course, one word she never had a problem with. Again, there was welcome empowerment for a nonverbal child.

But even after talking became a little easier for Eleanor, she still didn’t seem to feel impelled to respond verbally to books in the manner of her sister. Then, just last year, came the Opie-Wells Here Comes Mother Goose (Candlewick). With its stunning page design and delightful range of verse and song and jump-rope rhymes, it quickly became the bedtime reading of choice for Emily, Eleanor, and me. Eleanor immediately claimed some verses as her own exclusive property: “Dusty Bill” (“I’m Dusty Bill from Vinegar Hill / Never had a bath and I never will”) “Brush Hair Brush,” “I’m a Little Teapot,” “Miss Mary Mack,” “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” She claimed them in various, mostly nonverbal ways: She would stand on the bed and do the movements to “I’m a Little Teapot,” patty-cake with me to “Miss Mary Mack” and “Pease Porridge Hot,” and shout the last word with me when I read “Brush hair, brush. The men have gone to plow. If you want to brush your hair, brush your hair NOW.” It was also NOT okay for big sister Emily to read aloud any of her verses; only I could. Soon we all fell into a most pleasing pattern of anticipating particular verses and spreads. Emily’s domain included some of the longer and more sophisticated rhymes, such as “The Bells of St. Clements” and “As I Was Going to St. Ives”; I was attracted to the more surreal verses, particularly the one that begins “Will you come to my party” and involves Mrs. Murphy tossing peanuts in the air. (That one is fun to add a little syncopation to: “will you come to my party, will you come, um, um.”)

Here Comes Mother Goose would have been my favorite family reading experience of the year even if that pattern had simply continued unchanged. But it didn’t. One night, as we were turning the page from the bouncy (and, again, slightly surreal) “I am a Girl Guide dressed in blue” to the evocative and gentle “Donkey, donkey, old and gray,” Eleanor suddenly began to recite. She recited the whole donkey poem, in her endearing, gruff, R-less little voice — and it soon became apparent that she had memorized every one of the verses we read nightly. Emily and I were flabbergasted — it was as if she had suddenly spouted forth the Declaration of Independence. Which in a way she had, of course, for from then on she was a full partner in the reading experience. She took over all my “parts,” reading them aloud — complete with syncopation when indicated — in addition to her own. (“Jelly on a plate,” with its three verses, provoked complex nightly negotiations: who would get to do “baby on the floor”?)

It was a liberating experience for her, and brought home the point that for anyone with a speech impediment, reciting poetry or saying lines from a play — using someone else’s words — makes it easier. A point made even more clearly with the next experience that will go down in our family-reading history: reading William Steig’s classic Doctor De Soto (Farrar). With its lush, distinctive language, archetypal David vs. Goliath story, and pictures rich in character and humor, it became an immediate favorite. (Emily, with her seven-year-old sense of humor, particularly liked the line about the fox’s “rotten biscuspid and unusually bad breath.”) For anyone who’s missed this book, it’s one of the most enjoyable picture books ever to read aloud; rewarding for both adult reader and child listener. I found myself experimenting with different inflections and different voices each time I read the book (once even reading Doctor De Soto’s invitation to the fox to try his “remarkable preparation” in the sing-songy come-on voice of a carnival huckster). The all-too-human fox, with his wimpy aversion to pain (“‘Please!’ the fox wailed. ‘Have mercy, I’m suffering!’”) and ridiculously short gratefulness-span (“On his way home, he wondered if it would be shabby of him to eat the De Sotos when the job was done”), provided much comic relief and opportunity for exaggerated villainous voices. While I read the story, Emily would often read the fox’s part, which she soon memorized, thanks to our many repetitions. Eleanor demanded that we read it again and again, but never asked for a “line” or two of her own. Nor did she speak along with me.

Then, while flying home from a family vacation this spring, on the last leg of a long plane trip, it became clear (as it had with Here Comes Mother Goose) that despite her lack of overt participation, she nevertheless owned Doctor De Soto. We were seated in the midsection of a crowded DC-10 — no access to either window or aisle, and surrounded on all sides by a raucous group of adolescent hockey players who were treating the plane as their own private locker room. Eleanor was too tired even to be fascinated, and whispered to me that she didn’t much like this plane. I whispered back that I didn’t either, but that we were pretty much stuck until we landed in Boston. She thought about this for a while, but passive acceptance is not her way. A bit later, at the height of the ruckus, she suddenly belted out, in her biggest billy-goat-gruff voice, “‘NO ONE WILL SEE YOU AGAIN,’ SAID THE FOX TO HIMSELF.” This surreal announcement (well, surreal to everyone but Emily and me) was greeted by about six blissful seconds of silence from the stupefied hockey players; then play resumed as usual. But Eleanor had found a way — with one of the hapless fox’s more menacing lines of dialogue — to make her presence and her feelings known. The power of literature, indeed.

Martha V. Parravano is senior editor of The Horn Book Magazine.