Reading to Moms -- part 2

Today I completed my training on how to motivate parents to read to their children. I ended up learning a lot about how to make reading more exciting and fun.

When I do a workshop with the mothers at the shelter where I read, I’m supposed to pick a topic that is important to them and give them some ideas about books and how to read those books to their kids in a way that makes the whole experience fun. Fun may well be something most of these families are lacking as they ponder homelessness and worries about the future. At the conclusion of the workshop, the mothers will each take home a stack of books to add to their children’s “library.”

I kept getting images of a particular 4-year-old girl as she balled up her fists and held her breath before launching into a fit. She has severe anger management problems.

So with this little girl in mind, I determined that my first workshop would center on “emotions”, something I could use a little work on myself. Among the many books we looked at in my training sessions, I particularly liked “Today I Feel Silly” by Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell. It helps the child learn to identify the various moods of the day, including feeling silly, sad, cranky, etc. It includes a “mood wheel” at the end with a spinner that can be used to identify the mood du jour or play a game about all the various moods.

Another book which will work well with this topic is "How Are You Peeling?" It has the most adorable pictures of vegetables with faces that clearly depict the various moods.



Someone raised the question about how to deal with a mother who can’t read. It turns out even those mothers can have a very positive impact on their children. Today I learned about Benjamin Carson, an extremely successful pediatric neurosurgeon in Baltimore. When it looked like he might be going down a slippery slope as a young child, his mother pulled the plug on the TV and gathered an endless supply of library books. She required him to complete his homework, read one of those books, and tell her about it before he could go out and play. She chided him if his homework wasn’t neat and reminded him to check it over. Many years later he discovered she was illiterate.

I’m anxious to meet the mothers at my shelter. It will be so interesting to know more about the families the children come from. If I encounter a mother who has literacy problems, I will find help for her so she can more fully enjoy reading to her children.