Finding information

Why do you read? Reading has many purposes. We often have opportunities to model for our children reading for pleasure and for information. It is wonderful to see our children start to pick up books for fun. It is all the more exciting when they pick up books to find information.

There are innumerable ways we rely on reading for information. Looking up a new bug or finding a favorite recipe are examples. In our testing this week, there was a section about using resources like an atlas, dictionary, or index to search for desired information. Thankfully our family enjoys hunting for information, so this was a fairly easy section. As a side note, there was sure a lot of reading in the test, even in the math section.

My five-year-old confirmed again today that we start practicing information gathering skills from an early age at our house. She was doing an activity in her princess magazine. It was a list of four true and false questions. She brought it to me completed, proudly telling me she got all the answers right! I was in awe! The sentences were complicated and, while she has been surprising me with her rapidly growing reading proficiency, I couldn't believe she had actually read them! Then she confessed, "I didn't read them. I just circled random answers and then checked in the back. And I got them all right!" Way to use your resources, girl!

Classics

I enjoyed this short article from Reading Rainbow about the value of teaching children classic literature. I would expand on it to include that children also learn patterns in storytelling from classic literature. Many of the old fairy tales have been remixed and new versions appear or appear in other forms from countries around the world. There are Cinderella tales from many cultures. What a rich learning experience for children to compare and contrast these tales. It builds higher order thinking skills when you look for things that are the same and different between these stories. Then go one step further and write or tell your own version of a classic tale.

Books are always being written and new classics are born. I wouldn't be surprised if Horton's Miraculous Mechanisms is one of these. This is my son's favorite book this week. When he reads seven chapters in the middle of the night, I know the book is a winner!

What are your favorite classics? What new books do you predict will become classics? Add your thoughts in the comments!