All in the Timing
Why reading ahead of your grade level isn’t necessarily a good thing.
by Dashka Slater
June 8, 2009
"Ageist!" he sputtered indignantly.
"Some people think that kids your age don't like picture books," I said cautiously. I had hoped he wouldn't find this out.
Milo was outraged. "What? But picture books are awesome."
A good answer, given that my most recent picture book was dedicated to him. I probed a little deeper, just in case he was only telling me what I wanted to hear. "What exactly makes them awesome?" I asked. He gave me an exasperated look. "They have pictures,"
he said.
Duh. We tend to think that illustrations are just there to keep the attention of a kid who can't follow the story without them, forgetting that we like pictures just as much as children do.
Continued from previous page...
Pale Male - age 6
Chicken Butt! - age 7
Miley Cyrus: Miles to Go - age 8
Goosebumps - age 9
Don Quixote - age 10
"I say to parents, 'Have you ever heard of coffee table books?'" remarks Valerie Lewis, who owns
Hicklebee's, a children's bookstore in San Jose, California. "When they have picture books on their coffee table, they think it's very interesting and arty. But when Billy finally learns to read, his parents reward him by taking away his pictures."
Milo proudly identifies himself as a bookworm, a description that seems particularly apt when I find him burrowed into the sofa, his long body cocooned in his favorite blanket and his face obscured by the covers of a book. Seeing him there reminds me of
myself at the same age, and I'm eager to acquaint him with all the books I loved when I was nine —
A Wrinkle in Time,
The Book of Three,
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. But I'm cautious too, knowing that reading a book at the wrong time can be worse than not reading it at all. In first grade, with
Harry Potter mania raging through his school, I knuckled under and read Milo
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, despite feeling he was too young to really appreciate it. I was wrong: he loved it. But the series quickly gets darker and more complex. Mid-way through the third book, Milo — now in second grade and reading
it on his own — tossed it aside. "It's boring," he told me.
For a seven-year-old, "boring" has a vast portfolio of possible meanings, but in the case of Milo and
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I was pretty sure it meant "too soon." The jokes, the innuendos, the relationships and rivalries — it was all over his head. Looking at the discarded volume, its pages spread like the wings of a felled bird,
I remembered reading
The Princess Bride when I was eleven. I'd seen it at a supermarket, and thought I was buying a fantasy in the vein of
The Prydain Chronicles and the
Narnia books. Three-quarters of the way through, I pitched it across the room, nauseated and infuriated by the torture and death of Westley, the hero. (Westley is revived later on, but I never got that far). Golding's lampooning of fairytale conventions
is hilarious for adults. But as a child, it just hurt my feelings.
Picture book writer Erica Perl (Ninety-three in My Family,
Chicken Butt) is also the mother of a bookish nine-year-old, and she told me she too worries about serving books before their time. Her daughter loved
Judy Blume's Fudge books, but when she finished them, Perl decided against revealing that there were other Blume books to choose from. "I think she can wait a year," she told me. "When I think of a book like
Blubber, which deals with cruelty and social meanness — I'm not quite ready for her to see that."
©2009 Dashka Slater and Babble Media
About the Author
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