All in the Timing
Why reading ahead of your grade level isn’t necessarily a good thing.
by Dashka Slater
June 8, 2009
I was four when I learned to read. Back then — the late 1960s — doing so was considered a sign of extraordinary precocity — something akin to dog-paddling across the English Channel or memorizing the Encyclopedia Britannica. When I was around six, I got my
hands on a gold-embossed volume of Shakespeare's sonnets and carried it around with me whenever I went with my parents to a dinner party. I couldn't comprehend a word of what I was reading, but the sight of me with my little book of Shakespeare was guaranteed
to elicit gasps of delight and astonishment from the adults. Once the hubbub had subsided and the grown-ups had returned to their own conversations, I sat down in a corner and quietly drew pictures with my crayons in the margins.
These days, the reading ability that wowed my parents' friends is no big whoop. All children are expected to begin reading in kindergarten, having been prepared in advance by prenatal read-alouds, the healthful ingesting of board books in infancy, and flashcard
drills in preschool. At today's dinner parties (usually burritos wolfed down on the sidelines of a soccer game), I hear parents dropping the names of children's books as if they were designer labels. "Junie
B. Jones?" one might say witheringly. "My daughter loved that in preschool, but now she's reading the sixth
Harry Potter."
CommonSenseMedia says to read these books at these ages...
Cat - age 2
Sergio - age 3
The Snow Day - age 4
Fancy Nancy - age 5
…continued on next page…
In the children's section of bookstores and libraries, I've watched parents prying picture books out of their school-aged children's hands with a look of pained embarrassment. "You're too old for this," they say loudly, just in case anyone nearby might think
their child suffers from some sort of developmental delay. "You know you don't like reading these kind of books anymore."
As a children's book writer who has yet to outgrow the habit of reading picture books for pleasure, I find all of this a bit disturbing. Of course it's wonderful that children are reading, and wonderful when they read complicated books. But in the fuss about
literacy and reading levels and school achievement, something fundamental gets lost: the pleasure of the book for its own sake. Books that are delightful for ten-year-olds are not necessarily delightful for six-year-olds, and too often both parents and teachers
encourage children to read books that are too old for them, or discourage them from reading books we have deemed "too young," thus guaranteeing that reading will always feel like a chore.
"It's not an exam, where you pass your
E.B. White level and you get to go to your
Tolkien level," observes Anita Silvey, author of
Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Children's Book. "The same child that reads
Charlotte's Web may also read
Captain Underpants. They may like
Charlotte's Web and
Captain Underpants kind of equally."
Recently I came home with a copy of
Wolves, a picture book by the incomparably wry and inventive Emily Gravett. I had checked it out of the library for my own amusement, but it caught the eye of my nine-year-old son, Milo, who was lying on the couch reading the 528-page fantasy novel
Eragon. "Can we read it?" he asked. I sat down on the couch, and we leafed through the book, giggling at the story of a rabbit who checks out a library book about wolves and ends up eaten by one. When we finished, he noticed the age range on the
fly leaf: 4-8.
©2009 Dashka Slater and Babble Media
About the Author
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