When to her go on reading

[rwilk]

DD is doing a great job with reading---she reads well both decoding and comprehension wise. She complains a bit about small text in real books, but she's able to read them fine. 

 

I  have her continue to read aloud to me a few times a week just because it seems like she should. But she HATES it and would much rather just read to herself.  I have a few potential issues.

 

1) How do I know she's getting things instead of just moving past tricky issues/things she doesn't understand? There's plenty that she'll read that she doesn't have the background to understand, and when we read together, I know she'll ask about it.  She almost never does when she's reading in her head.

 

2) How do I know if something bugs her?  She's emotionally five, and a lot of the books she COULD read would upset her.  She reads a ton, and I can't always keep up with everything she's reading. By having her read parts of each book to me, she'll usually bring up parts that were upsetting for her.  I don't have the time to read all the books she does (last year, she totaled 750), and it's sometimes hard to guess what will upset her.

 

Even ignoring her pleasure reading, we do some reading as lit, talking about all the good things one should talk about--character, tone, setting, plot, and so on.  We slow down and go through some books checking for comprehension, talking about forshadowing, flashbacks, and all that.  Maybe I'm just being obsessive.  

[Rosie_0801]

Where is she getting the upsetting books from?

 

 

[tm919]

My approach at that age was to screen some, but fill in the huge gaps I had no time to screen with books designed to be read aloud to about k but with a higher reading level.

[rwilk]

Where is she getting the upsetting books from?

Mostly the library. The problem is that it's hard to predict what will contain something upsetting.  She read a book about unicorns that had her in tears because it was a tale that ended with the unicorns going extinct, and she found it heartbreaking.  But she doesn't talk about it unless she reads it to me. She holds it in and gets broody.

[mathnerd]

I have an emotionally sensitive kid too who cannot read Harry Potter (kid with both parents dead is too hard to handle for him), who cried when he read the biography of Abraham Lincoln where it said that his mother died when he was 7 (he did not realize that such things happened), cried when he read Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox (Fox got shot at) etc etc. I screen what he reads - I ask him sometimes if it is OK if a particular upsetting thing happened to a character before hand and then give the book to him. Fantasy, Adventure, Mystery, Humor and talking animal books are the main genres that work for him. 

 

Something that helped him make a quantum leap towards reading what normal kids read in terms of emotional sensitivity has been group literature classes based on book selection that the group works on together. Somehow reading about orphans, diseases, death etc in a group setting where there are no other kids freaking out seems to make the reading and the processing of books with those topics normal for him.

[Jackie]

Mostly the library. The problem is that it's hard to predict what will contain something upsetting. She read a book about unicorns that had her in tears because it was a tale that ended with the unicorns going extinct, and she found it heartbreaking. But she doesn't talk about it unless she reads it to me. She holds it in and gets broody.

Honestly, I gave up a bit. Like this, I have a hard time predicting what DD will find upsetting. Charlotte dies, and barely a blink. A kid is sent to boarding school and there's major tears over being separated from parents. What!?

 

If a book looks like it is targeted at early-ish elementary, or looks fairly lighthearted, I just let her have at it. If a book is recommended to her (she asks the librarian for recs) and it looks at a glance that the themes might be darker, I tell her I'd like to read it first so I can give her a heads up if I think it might be over her scariness threshold. She really doesn't want books over her personal threshold, so she's happy with that arrangement.

[Dmmetler]

I have an emotionally sensitive kid too who cannot read Harry Potter (kid with both parents dead is too hard to handle for him), who cried when he read the biography of Abraham Lincoln where it said that his mother died when he was 7 (he did not realize that such things happened), cried when he read Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox (Fox got shot at) etc etc. I screen what he reads - I ask him sometimes if it is OK if a particular upsetting thing happened to a character before hand and then give the book to him. Fantasy, Adventure, Mystery, Humor and talking animal books are the main genres that work for him.

 

Something that helped him make a quantum leap towards reading what normal kids read in terms of emotional sensitivity has been group literature classes based on book selection that the group works on together. Somehow reading about orphans, diseases, death etc in a group setting where there are no other kids freaking out seems to make the reading and the processing of books with those topics normal for him.

This is what helped here, too. Once DD realized that other kids were upset, but were able to go on, she started being more capable of moderating her reactions and not shutting down.