Dr. Heather W. Allen
The
Factual
Homeschooler
Reading—
How Important Is It?
A passion for reading is a foundation for much in life . . . .
Reading is an amazing adven- ture. I remember as a child picking up a book and being lost in the pages for hours at
a time. I also remember that the rule in
our home growing up was that we had
to go to bed at 8 p.m., but we could stay
up later, in bed, provided we were reading. My brother and sisters and I would
often read until our parents would come
in, sometimes hours later, to tell us it
was time for lights out. It did not take us
long to become avid readers, engrossed
in stories that took us to faraway places.
We also found ourselves fascinated by
nonfiction works, especially journals
of explorers, such as Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark, who left St. Louis in
1804 to find a water route to the Pacific,
or John Wesley Powell, who explored
the Colorado River and Grand Canyon
in 1869 and again in 1871. Then there
were the classics. How could a child not
love Anne of Green Gables or Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I
cannot imagine not reading something
every day.
Frederick Douglass said, “Once you
learn to read, you will be forever free.”
1
There is such heartfelt truth to that
statement. As I started researching this
topic, I focused on the literacy statistics.
Literacy is the ability to read and write
and should be our primary goal when
educating our children. Eudora Welty
said, “Indeed, learning to write may be
a part of learning to read. For all I know,
writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
2
Is your child a reader? Is your child a
writer? Have you seen that one follows
the other as stated by Welty? I know in
my home I have. My older children were
not overly keen on reading when I first
started the whole teaching-them-to-
read process. Early on you would have
thought that reading was the worst thing
imaginable for my oldest son. We had
spent years reading to him, along with
his siblings, and he was quite content to
maintain the status quo. Why read when
Mom and Dad will read to me? We still
to this day read to all of our children,
but our son knew his time had come. He
would learn to read and he would love it
like we do.
