I’ve been asked to give a presentation at Relief Society’s Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment night next week about how I love reading and literature. I plan on focusing on how reading enriches our families and our personal lives. I wanted to focus on how it enriches our home as well, but I don’t have any ideas. I’d love to hear your ideas about any part of this.
How does reading enrich your home, family, and/or personal life?
Dad and I have read scriptures, Sunday lessons, and conference talks together every night since we were married. Back scratches are always the perk.
When you were younger, I used to read aloud in the car on trips. I remember Tom Sawyer and A Wrinkle in Time. I also read scriptures to you over breakfast. We did the whole Book of Mormon one year when President Benson said we should.
I also read aloud to Frank every day after school the year I was expecting you. I couldn’t do much during my last couple of pregnancies, so I did a lot of reading to kids. I remember my mother reading to me. When I was in 2nd grade, I joined a book club, but the books they sent each month were too hard for me, so my mother read them to me. I still have some of them–A Dog for Davie’s Hill and No Children; No Pets. When I was in the hospital for a several months when I was 12, my mother came to the hospital and read Nancy Drew books to me, so the hospital experience has that good association for me.
I don’t know if you want to go into the academic advantages. Experts say kids need 3,000 hours of lap time as pre-readers. From parents reading, they learn about the structure of a narrative, vocabulary, sentence grammar, world information, as well as tchnical information about reading–front to back, left to right, top to bottom, that symbols represent words, pictures help explain text. You can predict, talk about feelings, and convey the idea that learning is fun. Also build inter-personal relations, share testimony, and relax. These days, reading keeps kids off computers and TV. When I was a young mom, I read that it was good for my kids to sometimes see me so engrossed in a book that I couldn’t stop to do housework. It was one of the most liberating things I ever read! Yea books. During the 20 years I was home as a full-time mom, books helped me stay sane. I alway had a reading project and treated myself to book club. One year I read all the Pulitzer prize winners; one year I read all of Willa Cather; one year I got almost all the way through Mark Twain; one year Charles Dickens. I did Hawthorn and Melville and Faulkner. It gave me a real advantage when I went to graduate school in English. I’d read so much