September 26, 2002

Another half hour, another three great books. I came into this session wary of how familiarity and time seemed to have increased the Brownian motion of the kids last week, so I set out to lay down expectations for the kids’ behavior this week.

“Hi again kids!” I said with real enthusiasm. “Are you ready to read some more books?”

“Yes!” they said with an enthusiasm that seemed to match my own. I hoped it would last.

“We’re here to read books today, and not to get up and walk around or talk, right?” I asked.

“Right!” they reassured me.

“OK, let’s go,” I said. “Our first book today is The Adventures of Max the Minnow.”

“We have that book!” about half the kids cried upon seeing it, but then on looking closer, every one said, “But it’s different.”

“Max the Minnow” has a couple of goofy oversized eyes that poke through holes in each of the pages, so a different character on each page seems to have those eyes. It’s part of a series of books with that same feature, and we even have another of them at home, though I hadn’t seen this particular one — my favorite of the series — anywhere but in our home before.

It was a hit, almost from the first page, even though three of the kids came in late, making me worry that the distraction of those arrivals was causing the kids to lose track of what was happening in the book. Mimicking the voice of Morris A., the saxophone-playing manta ray, brought them back to me in a hurry, however, laughing, and the book proceeded pretty much without interruption to the end after that, though I paused a few times to ask if the kids knew the meaning of a word I wasn’t sure they’d seen before. On the last page was a glossary with pictures of the real sea animals they’d seen in the book, however, and this brought on a flurry of questions and comments I hadn’t seen since our first day together.

“How could he jump rope without any legs?” asked one girl.

“Well, it’s kind of a pretend book,” I said. “These fish don’t have any arms, either.” And that seemed to make sense to her.

“I like the crab,” one boy said.

“I liked it when he pinched the shark’s nose!” said another.

“I like the shark!” said a third boy.

“I like the whale,” said a girl, meaning the dolphin.

“I like the whale and the shark,” said the third boy.

“Those and the manta ray are the two biggest animals in the book,” I said.

“I liked the manta ray best!” said another boy, laughing.

“I saw a dead jellyfish at the beach!” said another girl, and stories of seahorses and other sea creatures seen on other beaches, some rather fanciful, went on for several minutes from there. They might have gone on even longer if I hadn’t reached for the second book, “Giant John”, which had been a favorite of my wife’s when she’d been this age.

“Is the giant bigger than you?” one girl asked as I opened to the title page.

“Much bigger than me!” I said, and began. To my surprise, the kids stayed with me the whole way, laughing when the giant and his mother had only two potato chips to share for dinner, and when the castle crashed down, laughing some more when the Giant put it back together so sloppily.

“They’re eating the fairy!” one boy said at the baked bean banquet on the last page, and I had to show him how that fairy was only sitting on the giant’s finger and not in his spoon. And that was that.

“Are you ready for another book?” I asked, as incredulously as I could.

“Yes!” they told me, and I brought out “The Legend of the Poinsettia”.

“That’s a city,” said a girl I hadn’t heard from yet today.

“It’s kind of a flower,” I said. “It’s actually a plant that looks like a flower.”

“It’s a God book,” said my son Liam, who’d wanted to know ahead of time what I would be reading today.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s more of a real story than the others.”

The kids seemed slower to enter this book than they had the other two. By the third page, I had to remind them that we were reading and not talking. Several of the kids even shushed each other, something I hadn’t wanted to do myself after last week. But whatever the reason, I’d hooked them in just a few pages more, as Lucida’s mother became sick and especially as little Lucida blamed herself for ruining Christmas. Guilt, it seems, may be something kids find it easy to empathize with. Which might explain a lot, I realized later. They were positively riveted by the time Lucida brought her clump of weeds into the church as a gift for the baby Jesus, and unusually quiet afterwards, as they digested the miracle of La Flor de Nochebuena.

I left the kindergarten thankful for a wonderful half hour with these great kids, but thoroughly puzzled as to what could have made this week so much more enjoyable for everyone than last. The books I chose? The order I presented them? They’ve done so well for the first book I read them all three weeks … it’s only until the second book that I’ve hit trouble, if I hit trouble at all. Ah well, the year is long, and I hope to learn at least as much from it as the kids do.

———-

“The Adventures of Max the Minnow”, 1997, by William Boniface, illustrated by Don Sullivan.

“Giant John”, 1964, story and pictures by Arnold Lobel.

“The Legend of the Poinsettia,” 1994, retold and illustrated by Tomie dePaola

Week 2, September 19, 2002

The kids seem to have gotten accustomed to the idea of a Dad reading to them, because my second experience with them was nothing like the first. Most obviously, they hardly offered up anything close to the number of questions and comments they did last week. For another, they paid less attention to me and more to their friends. This could have been a function of the books I chose this week being less interesting, but I actually think it had more to do with the novelty of being read to having worn off.

The day started innocently enough. One child asked me if I would be reading to them every week, I said “yes”, and I jumped right into the first book, “The Remarkable Farkle McBride”, with it’s familiar A.A. Milne-inspired cadences and rhymes, and they seemed highly interested in the idea of wee Farkle alternately mastering and disgustedly discarding one symphonic instrument after another. The picture of a trombone in a garbage can seemed to fill them with a most particular glee, and the idea of now 10-year-old Farkle banging away on a full drum kit even sparked a few contributions.

“My brother plays the drums!”

“We have a drum!”

The last page’s fold-out brought another flurry of comments.

“Your book is broken!”

“It’s ripped!”

“No, you’ll see,” I promised, then read the words from what appeared to be nothing but curtains, and finally folded back the leaves to reveal the double-wide page showing the entire orchestra with a beaming Farkle in its center.

“Oooh!” several kids actually said, and “Wow!”, and several even laughed.

“His head is really big!” one observed.

“It looks like it’s going to explode!” said another. I can hardly wait to bring in “The Five Chinese Brothers”.

On a roll, I brought out “Bill and Pete”, a whimsical book that I’d brought the previous week in case I needed another to fill my half hour. This week it looked like I would need a third book.

Then one girl asked to go to the bathroom. I noticed the line in the corner of the room for a drink of water, four deep and getting impatient. The first boy in the line had plugged the sink and was playing with the water rather than taking a drink. A minor verbal intervention later and the bottleneck returned to his seat, with the other kids quickly following after taking their drinks. Two girls were talking with each other, ignoring shushes from me. Later I learned that shushing isn’t recommended, since it doesn’t seem to do any good. Next week I’ll know so much more.

I started the book and the kids stayed with me for the first few pages without much more trouble, though there was definitely a good deal of whispering going on. When we reached the part where Ms. Ibis asked her class to recite the alphabet, I asked the kids if they could do it, too, and every single blessed one of them launched immediately into the alphabet song, even to the “Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me” kicker. When Mama crocodile said “That was beautiful” on the next page, I had a hard time keeping from beaming. But then I started to lose them. A few pages later, when the little crocs started spelling their names, I got some back.

“His daddy’s name is Tom,” said one boy, about another.

“I have a friend named Amy,” said a girl.

And then I lost them again. Several more shushes didn’t help, and without my noticing it, the same boy who’d been playing with the water earlier had gotten up and started doing so again, and this time he wouldn’t come back until I went and got him, ignoring me until I actually touched him. I had to separate two girls who wouldn’t stop talking to each other, and one boy was poking several of the kids sitting around him, so I had to move him, too. Speaking the caution by the old crocodile in an old man’s voice went unheeded. So, too, did the bad guy’s capture of young Bill the kindergarten crocodile and even his thought bubble that contained what I thought was a very cute depiction of a green suitcase with a cartoon crocodile’s snout, feet, and tail. Even the sight of Bill improbably climbing straight up the garden wall didn’t help. But the sight of the bad guy’s bare bottom as he fled across the sand to Cairo did spin their heads around, one by one, and actually brought them back, laughing and waiting for another page as outrageous, for the rest of the book.

Unfortunately for all, that was the last page they found interesting from that book, and the third book I read to them, “Ferdinand”, which I remembered fondly from my youth, sailed straight over their heads. I had to interrupt the reading several times to keep the kids quiet and in reasonably good behavior, though the site of the bull’s bulging eyes as it was stung by the bumblebee drew chuckles from some of the few who were still paying attention.

Afterwards I was very discouraged, and even my wife’s encouraging statements that the kids will be easier as the year goes on seemed faint reward.

———-

“The Remarkable Farkle McBride”, 2000, by John Lithgow, illustrated by C.F. Payne.

“Bill and Pete”, 1978, story and pictures by Tomie de Paola.

“Ferdinand”, 1936, by Munro Leaf, drawings by Robert Lawson

September 12, 2002

Today I read to my son’s Catholic school kindergarten for the first time. Two weeks ago I volunteered to read to his class for half an hour each Thursday morning. At the orientation meeting for the parent readers for all grades (K-8), every other parent in attendance was female, and about half the comments those other parents made during the meeting were geared specifically towards the best way to read to kindergartners. I don’t know if that’s because they were as surprised to have a Dad in their midst as I was to be the only Dad in their midst, or whether they were just as concerned for the woman who would read to the kindergarten on Tuesday mornings because we were both first-timers. Either way, several volunteered to share the books they’d had the best response to in past years, but I had a few ideas of my own and decided to wait a week or three before trying someone else’s.

So, over the past two weeks I’ve been going through my kids’ voluminous library, acquired either through inheritance from other parents whose kids had outgrown them, through gifts from other friends and family members who know our high regard for good books, or through our own trips through bookstores and garage sales over the past ten years. I picked out four books I was pretty sure the kids would like, which might last through two half-hour sessions.

The class began. I introduced myself to the 18 children sitting in a rough semicircle in front of me, then Liz, the kindergarten teacher, asked the kids if they knew who I was.

“Yes!” four of them shouted, almost in unison, “He’s Liam’s Daddy!”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because he looks exactly like him!” they shouted again, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

The teacher went off to her staff meeting a minute later and I opened the first book, The Last Snake in Ireland. Before I had a chance to flip two pages, and before the snakes in the book had even begun to start crawling down St. Patrick’s green cliff to the sea, hands started going up.

“Yes?” I said.

“Me and my Mommy and Daddy went camping and we saw a ‘water snake’!”, said one girl sitting right in front of me, meaning, I think, that she had seen a rattlesnake.

“I saw a garter snake, and it was a wild one!” said a boy in the back.

“Wow!” I said. “That’s cool!”

“I saw two garter snakes!” said the same boy.

“Are they sea serpents?” another girl asked, looking at the picture on the next page.

“You’ll find out soon,” I said, wondering how long the questions would continue and what I’d gotten myself into.

“My friend says there’s a sea monster in a lake,” said another girl.

“The cobra is the king of the snakes!” said an enthusiastic boy.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said another.

“I saw a boa constrictor at the zoo that could eat a person!” said yet another, and the questions got farther and farther away from the book after that. About three minutes and a dozen questions later, in a brief lull as the number of raised hands dwindled to two, I told them it was time to start reading the book again, answered the remaining two, and continued.

Half the book and several more requests to go to the bathroom passed quickly, the kids as sucked into the story as I was in doing my best to affect an Irish accent when the one remaining snake in Ireland and St. Patrick spoke to one another.

As St. Patrick was finally about to get the snake to jump into his entrapping box, after having chased him across the breadth of Ireland, one more boy asked “Why does he want to do that?” and after I explained, he repeated the question in the exact same tone of voice. One answer and two pages later, the children all laughed as the snake, now snug in the box, fell into the waters of Loch Ness and St. Patrick told him he’d be back to get him tomorrow, just as they’d laughed at the beginning when the snakes were teasing St. Patrick’s old lame dog Finbar. The kids loved the ending as much as I always love telling it, and a few more questions about sea serpents and monsters later, we started the second book, The Clown of God. This time we read three pages before hands began rising.

“I saw someone juggling!”

“I saw a guy at the circus jump through hoops!”

“Is he an orphan?”

“We went to Sirk … Sirk … Cirque du Soleil!”

Two more pages and they drew back their breath at the thought of juggling burning torches, then the questions began anew.

“Is it dangerous to juggle burning torches?”

“Plates on sticks are dangerous!”

“I saw burning sticks on Lilo and Stitch!”

“We have that movie!”

Five minutes of questions ensued as the kids began moving more restlessly, with no end of raised hands in sight. Finally I cut off the flow, even while several hands were still raised. I began affecting an Italian accent as little Giovanni negotiated his passage away from Sorrento with the Maestro. The second book was more interactive than the first, with kids asking questions sometimes even without raising hands, and me answering them offhand if I could do so in a second or two. Several shushes were needed. Next time, I won’t be answering so many questions, I think.

“Why did they throw things at him?” one boy asked, as Giovanni became an old man.

That needed a little explaining. And re-explaining, but afterwards the children were quieter. “Who is the Holy Child?” I asked a few pages later, as his statue made its first appearance in the story.

“The baby Jesus!” cried several children.

Then, as his birthday was first mentioned, I asked “When is that?” and several of the same children cried out “The baby Jesus!” again. One girl raised her hand, and when called upon replied “Christmas!” The children quieted again at this, seemingly impressed. Several pages without questions followed. Into the air went Giovanni’s sticks, plates, clubs, rings, and rainbow of balls. “And what came next?” I asked.

No answers. After a few seconds, my son put his hand up. “Yes, Liam?” I said.

“The sun in the heavens,” he said, smiling broadly.

“That’s right!” I said, happy he’d had a chance to answer a question on his own, even as the youngest child in the class.

The Principal’s voice came on over the intercom. St. Catherine’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance followed, with the childrens’ hands first piously together and then reverently over their heart. Several minutes of announcements followed, while Liz returned. I worried that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the book. Maybe the kids did too.

“Three more pages,” I said to her when the announcements were finally over, and she nodded. I continued, relieved, and old Giovanni fell dead to the floor, prompting several more questions, and then came the ending.

“How did that happen?” one girl asked.

“It was a miracle,” I replied.

“It’s a miracle!” a boy said, seeming to purposely mimic the tagline to a TV commercial that must have finished airing 10 years before he was even born.

But it did feel like a miracle.

———-

The Last Snake in Ireland, 1999, by Sheila MacGill-Callahan, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand.

The Clown of God, 1978, an old story told and illustrated by Tomie dePaola