Margo Bartlett
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Reading in the family
When they were learning to read, my grandsons brought home decodable books: readers the size of a playing card with simple stories featuring Bob, Dot, and Pat who did things with bats and pots and cats. The plots were slender, but they were more compelling than my grade-school readers about Alice...
Summer stretch
I wanted to write about my eleven-year-old grandson’s decision to read To Kill a Mockingbird as an independent reading assignment. The book was on a “stretch” list his fifth-grade teacher had distributed, so his choice wasn’t like deciding to read Ulysses or worse, Infinite Jest, out of nowhere. Still, even voracious eleven-year-old readers...
Still Reading Together
Some grandparents remember their grandchildren’s early years as a kaleidoscope of blocks, plastic stacking rings, sticky highchair trays, and cars named Doc Hudson, Lightning McQueen and Flo. What I remember are book characters: Davy the sheep from Matthew Cordell’s Another Brother, the doleful rodent in Robert Kraus’s Whose Mouse Are...
More thoughts about virtues
I’m back again with further thoughts about the virtues my grandsons’ school district assigns each month, and that grandparents (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) discuss in classroom sessions. I’ve described the fun of reading to a group of first graders who are invariably thrilled to see me. While they're putting away their...
First-grade character traits
Once a month just before lunch, I turn up at my six-year-old grandson’s first-grade classroom with two books for an event called “Circle of Grandparents.” COG is a program offered in my grandsons’ school district, where nine times a school year, grandparents — or anyone who wants to claim the...
Reading what they're reading
My nine-year-old grandson recently made a list of his favorite things. Number one was math. (He’s kind of a phenom.) Number two was reading. First, I’m glad this boy loves math. I’m glad his parents toss him math questions at every whipstitch, and I’m glad he considers answering them fun....
Everywhere Babies 2022
I was surprised and also not surprised to learn the book Everywhere Babies has been the focus of conservative outrage in Walton County, Florida. I was surprised because I hadn’t realized this book, written by Susan Meyers and illustrated by Marla Frazee, was well known. I have an embarrassing tendency...
Outgrowing shared reading someday
I fully expected my older grandchildren to start pulling away from reading together by now. They’d be nice about it. They’d gently explain — and by gently, I mean raucously, interrupting and overlapping each other, but still gently, in the sense that they’d sincerely not want to hurt my feelings...
Back to something like normal
The recent holiday was almost normal. For much of the day, we were nine: our daughters and sons-in-law, the three grandchildren, my husband and me, all of us vaxxed, vaxxed again, and boosted. Covid tests had been taken. We were good to celebrate. The grandchildren opened their gifts from their...
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