![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Junie B. Jones books
Apr. 24th, 2008 11:19 amFor anyone who has a young kid, you might know about the Junie B Jones books. It's a series featuring a personality-filled Kindergartner named Junie B(eatrice) Jones, who regularly drives her parents nuts (gently, of course) with her ideas, expressions, and way of viewing the world. *I* think the books are pretty hysterical. In the earlier ones Junie speaks like a regular little kid, but as the series moves on, she starts sounding like the gamblers in Guys and Dolls - that same speech pattern. Took me a while to pin that down, but now that I have, it's a score.
I've heard criticisms from other mothers online about the ungrammatical style of the books, and how they'll never let their young/beginner reader get near them. I think that's a shame, because they're funny.
The reason why this came up in my own head was a conversation I had with another mother who's middle school boy, like Mermaid, is not a reader. Rather, she said, he wasn't a reader UNTIL he found the spin-off novelizations of the game "Warcraft". She was amazed that he ripped through thick (250p+) books in hours or short days. "Hey," she said, "As long as he reading *something* I'm happy. And if he's reading something he *wants* to read, that's a thousand times better!"
Mermaid is the same way - she went nuts over the two "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" books she found at the school bookfair, and zipped through them in four short days. She even stayed up late reading them. She read them in the car. She read them when she got home. She read them *everywhere* until she finished them. Does it matter to me if what she reads isn't grammatically correct, or has a goofy story, or features teen vampires or silly stick figure cartoons? Hell no. I just want her to read.
And that's what parents really and truly want (the ones that care about reading at all, that is). Books that engage their kids, that excite them about stories or help them absorb vocabulary and contexts. It's a key to future thinking, literacy and, hopefully, some success out in the work world.
I think that parents that fuss too much over what their children LIKE to read, what interests the child, misses the point and a wonderful opportunity to get their child moving along into reading *other* things. You never know where curiousity will lead - and it could lead to their own research about, say, the history of vampires, which could lead into research about history of Transylvania, then the Balkans, then curiousity about history in general...you just never know.
Grammar is important, yes; but even more important is the excitement of *learning*, which to me, is what books are ALL about, even so called "fiction" and SF/F books and Westerns and name-your-genre.
Phew! I didn't mean to get onto the pulpit and preach.
I've heard criticisms from other mothers online about the ungrammatical style of the books, and how they'll never let their young/beginner reader get near them. I think that's a shame, because they're funny.
The reason why this came up in my own head was a conversation I had with another mother who's middle school boy, like Mermaid, is not a reader. Rather, she said, he wasn't a reader UNTIL he found the spin-off novelizations of the game "Warcraft". She was amazed that he ripped through thick (250p+) books in hours or short days. "Hey," she said, "As long as he reading *something* I'm happy. And if he's reading something he *wants* to read, that's a thousand times better!"
Mermaid is the same way - she went nuts over the two "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" books she found at the school bookfair, and zipped through them in four short days. She even stayed up late reading them. She read them in the car. She read them when she got home. She read them *everywhere* until she finished them. Does it matter to me if what she reads isn't grammatically correct, or has a goofy story, or features teen vampires or silly stick figure cartoons? Hell no. I just want her to read.
And that's what parents really and truly want (the ones that care about reading at all, that is). Books that engage their kids, that excite them about stories or help them absorb vocabulary and contexts. It's a key to future thinking, literacy and, hopefully, some success out in the work world.
I think that parents that fuss too much over what their children LIKE to read, what interests the child, misses the point and a wonderful opportunity to get their child moving along into reading *other* things. You never know where curiousity will lead - and it could lead to their own research about, say, the history of vampires, which could lead into research about history of Transylvania, then the Balkans, then curiousity about history in general...you just never know.
Grammar is important, yes; but even more important is the excitement of *learning*, which to me, is what books are ALL about, even so called "fiction" and SF/F books and Westerns and name-your-genre.
Phew! I didn't mean to get onto the pulpit and preach.
