Fostering a Life-long Love

Meryl pointed out In2Books, a program to pair young readers with adult pen pals which began in the Washington, D. C., schools. The adult reads the same book the children do, and they correspond about it. Perhaps they will find that, as Thomas Jefferson did, I cannot live without books.

Deena and the girls have been reading the Little House series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Turns out we have a gap in our collection; so while we wait for their delivery, we finished Stuart Little. The girls, the Little Sister in particular, love singing along with Oliver!, so I tried Oliver Twist, but that didn’t work. Mr. Charles Dickens never found a word he couldn’t squeeze into a sentence somewhere, eventually finding his point somewhere between the beginning of his artful construction and its punctuation, on a course more meandering than not, but placing the antecedent somewhere towards the end of the sentence, with the prepositions scattered before it, renders his meaning hard for little ears to capture.

So they’re reading Alice in Wonderland.