Link has a mental block about reading and writing. He does just fine once he gets started, but he always views the project with dislike. I was therefore, delighted to discover that Link will devour some manga. Give him Kingdom Hearts, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, or Pokemon and he’ll sit on the couch reading all afternoon. I responded to this discovery by giving him more manga because I figured that even though there were far more pictures than words, Link was still reading.
This decision of mine was supported by an article in a recent scouting magazine that talked about why boys don’t like to read as much as girls do. According to the article this is because boys are less interested in relationships, feelings, and dilemmas than girls are. Boys are far MORE interested in farts, adventure, fights, and physical humor. Boys also tend to be more visual. There are genres which cater to both interests. Girls can find Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prarie, Magic Tree House, Harry Potter, and a plethora of princess or fairy themed books. Boys can find animorphs, manga, comic strips, comic books, and pulp-style adventure stories. Take a look at those two lists. Which list is most likely to be recommended by librarians and teachers? Over and over again boys are told that the kinds of things that they like are not worthwhile. The comic books are snatched from their hands and replaced with Magic Tree House books. Don’t get me wrong. We love Magic Tree House here. Kiki went through them all. So did Gleek. Even Link read a bunch of them, but he did not love them. For Link they were tolerable, even enjoyable, but he would never give up a video game to read Magic Tree House. He regularly does when he has a new manga to read.
So I patted myself on the back for being an enlightened parent and I kept supplying manga. All would be well and good, except that today Link’s teacher confiscated the manga and told Link that in 5th grade he needed to be reading books that were not comics. I’m not upset with the teacher. The teacher is very nice and earnest in his desire to help Link. I love what the teacher has got planned to help Link learn to love reading. But the event has me re-thinking my attitude. There is nothing wrong with Link reading manga. I will continue to supply it, but I also need to help him branch out a little. There is a world of wonderful books out there and most of them do not have pictures. Link doesn’t have to choose to read them, but I do not want him to be intimidated by a page full of nothing but words. The only way I can see for him to overcome that intimidation is through practice. So, I’m going to have to quest to see if I can find some books with no pictures that Link can love. I want to find the book that Link will give up video game time to read. I don’t know if it exists.
I have become somewhat doubtful about teachers and reading ever since my neice had a book she had borrowed from me removed as it was unsuitable for her to read. The book was Pigeon Post by Arthur Ramsome and was, it seems, too many pages long! She read it at home and enjoyed it.
Personally I prefer to get children reading somehow and then they will learn about books and enjoy them. I think you have the right idea. Start with something they enjoy and gently encourage development.
Roger
How old is Link? Have you given him the My Side of the Mountain books? I loved those as a Kid.
I wonder if they make novelizations of anime/manga series? If there’s some sort of bridge like that to get him into reading text-only books, that would help.
This link has a bunch of suggestions of books for fifth graders with good descriptions that could be starting point for your search for books
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/ca/678/http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/ca/678/
I am homeschooler who has a boy would would rather play video games than read. But he would rather read these books than play the video games. My son likes Geronimo Stilton books by Geronimo Stilton, Time Warp Trio by Jon Scieszka, Freddy Pig by Walter Brooks and he really loves the cat warrior books by Erin Hunter. The first one is called Into the Wild. You might look at them when you are at the library. Maybe one of them would be good for Link.
Teachers are individuals with their own prejudices and quirks. It does boggle me a little that a book would be taken from a child for being too long. This is why I try to keep in touch with the teachers and work with them instead of against them.
Link is almost 11. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look those up.
There probably are. I’ll have to poke around on Ye Olde Internet and see if I can find some. One of the challenges I’m finding is that manga (and by extension novelizations of manga) are not often stocked in libraries. They are starting to be, but not much locally yet. The exception to this is Kiki’s junior high library. Apparently by junior high they give up trying to make kids read the “worthwhile” stuff and are just desperate to get them to read at all. Link is going to like the junior high library, but it will take him two more years before he gets there.
Thanks for the link. I’ll have to scan through and see if anything will catch Link’s eye.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll check those out.
Reading Level?
What level does he read at?
When I was in 5th/6th grade, I started getting into the Star Wars books. I’ve always been an avid reader, though, and my reading level has always been pretty high. I know they did a young adult Star Wars series a while back, though I know nothing of the quality of it.
If there’s a paticular movie/game/etc type he enjoys, there’s probably a book about it somewhere.
There’s always the Time Spies series and the Supernatural Rubber Chicken, if you haven’t looked into those. Both have humor and adventure that’s very appealing to boys and aren’t so long that they daunt a reluctant reader.
Also, have you ever read the book “Guys Read” by Jon Sczieska? (Who is the Children’s Literature Ambassador, by the way.) It’s a book of essays by guy authors about what got them to enjoy reading. He has a whole project by the same name about reaching boys where they are. It used to be that books were mostly boy-oriented and now the pendulum has swung the other way. Check out http://www.guysread.com/–they have booklists and everything.
I spent one summer going through a couple dozen Danny Dunn books. They’re chapter books about three children who have science fiction-type adventures (one’s about robots, another’s about a dinosaur, another’s about riding a submarine, etc.), usually accompanied by Danny’s science professor uncle. I think they’re from the 1960s; they have that old-fashioned, wholesome sweetness to them. Probably an old-fashioned vocabulary, too, though I don’t really remember. The authors are Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin.
Along the science fiction line, you might also be interested in the Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron, though there are only two or three of these. They feature two boys who befriend a man who is secretly a [friendly] alien. If I remember correctly, they build a home-made rocket ship.
Has your family read _The Swiss Family Robinson_? That might be intimidatingly large for Link to tackle on his own; might be better for reading together. It’s got adventure, though — and no mushy romance, unlike the Disney movie of the book.
When I was Link’s age, I remember absolutely loving The Indian in the Cupboard and its sequels. The Castle in the Attic is another great one that I would recommend very highly.
Perhaps a bit more advanced, I would also recommend the Redwall series by Brian Jacques (pronounced “Jakes”). I absolutely adored these books. And, if he hasn’t already read it, The Hobbit is great for that age, even if the actual Lord of the Rings trilogy is a bit more advanced.
The Great Brain
My brother didn’t read well and found it a chore. A book really had to keep his attention for him to get beyond the first chapter. I remember him really liking The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald. It’s about a boy who’s very much like Tom Sawyer and told from the perspective of his little brother. It was liked enough that we bought the box set, which was handed down to me. I looked through that book list for 5th graders a few of which I read and the reading level of The Great Brain books seems about the same. (Looks like it’s listed on the 4th grade reading list.)
Has he read the Chronicles of Narnia? He might get into them if you start him on the Magician’s Nephew first.
I don’t know much about books for each grade level. I was doing a search for the reading level of the Narnia books and came across this scholastic website bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/homePage.do. You can look books up by level, find out the level of a specific title, or find similar books based on a title. You can also narrow the results by genre.
Darthparadox beat me to my only substantial suggestion, which would have been to look for novelizations of the anime he loves.
I have no clue about anime, and asked some friends in a chat forum and got the suggestion: “the first thing that springs to my mind is the Crest of the Stars series by Hiroyuki Morioka — the anime was based directly off the novels, and both are available in the US” with the provisio “it’s fairly kid-friendly, though there might be some concepts a younger kid might have a hard time grasping” Personally, I’m confident that Link and Kiki could likely handle concepts a bit higher than their age groups because they seem to have great relationships with parents willing to explain and talk stuff through with them. 🙂
A brief browse through Wiki and Google stuff looks as if there’s a lot of political stuff in it, or at least off-scenes politics shaping what the young main characters have to deal with. I noticed Amazon mentions “13 and above” “brief nudity, profanity, violence”. I don’t know how much of that is the adaptation or straight from the source books. Maybe you can grab the first and prescreen it? In your copious free time?
too many suggestions!
I second the Time Warp Trio series! It’s about 3 boys who are best friends and they travel in time. In the one about going to the future and they meet their great (great?) granddaughters you get to learn many many different ways to say “barf”.
Plus, the boys go into different times in the past and they run into pirates, Attila the Hun, Vikings, cave men…
If this series doesn’t scream BOY READ THIS! I don’t know what does.
(this series got turned into a cartoon, I wonder if it’s on video yet. sometimes I like reading the books and then seeing it on t.v. or movies)
Oh yeah, PLUS, they are not pictureless books… there are pictures here and there and they are little paperbacks NOT intimidating at all.
Also, if you watched the Star Wars cartoon movie that just came out there is a small book version of that that LightningBoy is reading right now. He even went over his 30 minutes reading time to keep reading it. (I think it even has pictures from the movie in the middle of it!)
Oh yeah, perhaps a Pokemon or gaming magazine would have more words to read than a manga…and be interesting.
LightningBoy found an interest in Robin Hood and when given his choice picked a big Robin Hood book to read. That’s exciting and adventurous!
Good luck! I’m trying to get LightningBoy reading more too.
In World of Warcraft there’s a library and books just lying around here and there… for the last few weeks LightningBoy has chosen to read those books for his reading time. Those books were not written for almost 11 year olds. hee hee!
my side of the mountain was one of my favorites.
another several are the Hardy boys books, in all the 28 dozen variants of manly boyish mystery, The ‘We were There…’ books that teach history and the like, and don’t forget the meanest trick of all. If he likes being red to, the book on tape method for the first chapter or so of a book can easily judge his interest. Also, if you hvae it in your area, look at BookIt. http://www.bookitprogram.com/
They did not MAKE me want to read, as I was home schooled and learned late, mostly out of a deep want to be able to read ahead in the books I had read to me. I learned on hardy boys and other ‘real’ books as much as children s books, and was reading Edger Rice Burroughs and other ‘age inappropriate’ (aka classic scifi/fantasy) works by 11-12, much to my teachers dismay. Book It! rewards keeping a reading journal, and gives Pizza as a reward for having read books from the huge master list. Combined with a library my only issue was that even going twice a week I was limited in how many I could take home.
Reading for me is an addiction. I consume a book many times, each time enjoying it. Paperbacks of 300-500 pages are the work of an hour, and have been since 5th grade. At age 10 I read very very little, Dysgraphia, Dyslexia, and ADHD make word comp while sitting still not my best field.
One thing that BOTHERED me growing up is that FAR to many of the books that are on the ‘must read for year’, ‘summer reading list’, ‘required for class x’ and similar lists are all more interesting to the female readers in the class. You may see a fear street or other similar pulp horror book that fits with soem popular topic be used, but most teachers tend towards solid (somewhat boring) classics. This, plus TV/games having TONS of rapid action and bright colors tends to make guys more likely to ignore books altogether, or see them as a chore for school not a joy.
There are plenty of books in most young adult library sections with language and content safe for the 10-14 age set, while still packed with adventure, mystery, strange new places, and the like. With plenty of books out there that call out like a beacon to the soul and desires of most young men, getting them hooked on them can turn reading from something they don’t want, to something they don’t want taken away. Library time for me was more important than TV time or a movie, and returning a book late was the end of the world.
Just remember, ANYTHING can become a chore, and when it does all joy in it becomes lost. A book as a reward, or a library trip as one, suddenly elevates reading to the level of ‘treat and good thing’ for most kids.
http://www.scottwesterfeld.com/
He’s written a couple of adult science fiction novels, which read kind of like a manga might if translated to words.
I haven’t read any of his young adult books, but his ability to paint with words in his adult works suggests to me that he might be part of what you’re looking for.
The grown-up sci-fi books are The Risen Empire, and The Killing of Worlds, a duology. I believe there are some gently adult themes in them – haven’t read them in a year or so. I am confident there is no explicitly adult material, but there are a couple of times where he skirts some things. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to Howard, for example, and my brother let his 14 year old read them after he did.
I would suggest hitting http://books.google.com, search for The Killing of Worlds, and find the Prologue. The description there of the vessel transforming reminds me of what I might have read if I’d read any of the Macross books.
Again, I’m only assuming that his young adult work is as good, not having much interest in it myself 😉 But he says some things on his website that suggest to me that his young adult work is where he makes his money.
Re: The Great Brain
Second Great Brain.
Book recommendations
It would be worth taking a look at some of Andre Norton’s books ( i.e catseye, lord of thunder). Another possibility would be the Reobert Heinleins. In particular, ‘Space family Stone’ could well get his attention.
Book recommendations
It would be worth taking a look at some of Andre Norton’s books ( i.e catseye, lord of thunder). Another possibility would be the Robert Heinleins children’s books. In particular, ‘Space family Stone’ could well get his attention.
Terry Pratchett! Right now I’m reading a book from the teen section downstairs at the library – but Pratchett is silly enough, with magic and stuff, that he might get a kick out of it.
Re: Reading Level?
Link’s reading level is hard to determine. If he is un-interested in the material his apparent reading level is low for his age, registering at around 3rd or 4th grade level. But he is capable of reading and comprehending much more complex things when he is focused and interested.
Thank you for that link. The article I read referenced Jon Sczieska and his guy’s read project, but I seem to have lost the article and couldn’t remember what Sczieska was named.
We love Pratchett. I read Wee Free Men out loud and the kids all listened with glee. But when I suggested to Link that he might want to read it again by himself, he scowled at me. He loves it, but won’t read it. Very confusing.
Maybe a different one? I’m reading Maurice and the something something Educated Rodents, and it’s great – but he might like the one about the Conan Barbarian wannabe? Or maybe the very first Rincewind book, he might feel a kindred spirit? Or there’s Equal Rites, about a girl (eew) who is the only female wizzard (kid hero might be more interesting?) – or Eric, which is about a boy who summons a fairly incompetent demon…
My personal favorites are Soul Music (classic rock n roll puns abound) and Maskerade (Phantom of the Opera gone Discworld)… I have about 20 of the books, and always want more.
He might read Pratchett if the books were a little thinner. The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy (Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, Johnny and the Bomb) and The Bromeliad Trilogy (Truckers, Diggers, Wings) might be better suited to him. The main characters are male which also might help. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is another good Pratchett YA book. Those books could get him interest in Pratchett as an author and be a stepping stone to the Disc World novels.
He may realize that trying to read the accent of the Nac Mac Feegles won’t be easy. I’m an avid reader and I had to re-read their conversations a couple of time to figure out what they were saying. Also the Tiffany Aching books are about a GIRL and the Mac Feegles, which may not interest him as much for personal reading.
P.S.
one more little suggestion:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
It’s a big book but, it has drawn pictures that help tell the story and then a few pages of reading then a few pages of pictures… so it might help the confidence in reading a “big book”. You should read it, it’s so cool…especially the last page!
Um, Spiderwick Chronicles?
Re: P.S.
First of all, I very much second (or third) the Hardy Boys. Some additional suggestions for books that my brother and I both enjoyed when we were preteens/early teens (and he didn’t like to read much either, although I did):
The Norby Chronicles by Isaac Asimov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norby) SF/mystery
The Three Investigators by Robert Arthur, Jr. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators) mystery/adventure
Tom Swift series by Victor Applegate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift -I think we read the third and fourth series) mystery/adventure
Artimis Fowl (and there’s a graphic novel too): http://www.eoincolfer.com/books/artemisfowl/artemisfowlgraphicnovel.html Fantasy/mystery
D.J. MacHale’s Pendragon series fantasy/mystery
You might also want to check out http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/booklistsbook.cfm
Hope this helps. I’m going to ask my brother if he remembers anything else.