By Christopher Byrne (Follow me on Twitter)

I’ve been talking to a lot of parents about summer reading and some of the challenges they’re facing getting their kids to read—even when it’s assigned by the school.

On the one hand, I sympathize with the kids. Having recently finished school for the year, the prospect of mandated reading seems a lot like more homework, particularly when teachers insist on picking books that don’t intrigue kids. I mean, “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” was written in 1937. Why teachers still assign it—since so many kids find it deadly and it’s on many summer lists—boggles my mind. (It’s a cute story, but it seemed old-fashioned when I was a kid. Imagine what it feels like to today’s kids!) Why set up reading to be a chore? Look at the success of Harry Potter and the Twilight series. Kids will read when the story engages them, and no teacher yet has convinced me that a Depression-era children’s book teaches reading skills more effectively than a popular, contemporary book. What’s wrong with giving kids credit for doing something they want to do? Because, on the other hand, reading is the single most important skill kids can have that will help foster success in school.

Now, in what will apparently seem like a contradiction, I’m going to make a case for reading classic literature as well. Whether it’s Shakespeare, Dickens, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius , Emerson, Twain, Franklin and so forth—the introduction to some of the great thinking that comprises our history is essential to a well-rounded education. To contemporary readers, some of this can seem like heavy going indeed, but the sequential development of reading skills in the preschool and primary and middle grades prepares kids to tackle this stuff as they get into high school and college. Establishing reading not just as an onerous task but a pleasure helps kids to establish the foundations they need to succeed in school. These “dead white males” who are so often vilified still provide the basis for much through in our Western culture and they should be read—not to the exclusion of more popular, fashionable writers but for context, and dare I say it, the intellectual rigor they demand.

However, if you don’t get kids reading, these doors will be shut to them, and they—and the culture—will be the worse for it. Just watch the Sunday talk shows and you’ll see the dearth of ideas or even discourse. When a bunch of Senators on both sides of an issue are merely sniping at each other, I hear Plato and Aristotle rolling in their graves.

All of which brings me to Amazon’s Kindle.

This e-reader, as it’s called, has certainly revolutionized reading. The ability to slip an entire library into your backpack is only one of its appealing features. You can get hundreds of thousands of books from the newest celebrity tell-all to the aforementioned classics. The latter have the advantage of being either free or costing under $1.

I became a fan of the Kindle when I discovered that it had stopped a family argument. An acquaintance of mine was having a heck of a time getting his Ninth Grade son to read “A Tale of Two Cities.” The struggle was escalating as the school year was ending and the unread book was hanging like a millstone on not just the kid but the family.

The father, an avid reader, downloaded the book (for 99 cents) onto his Kindle device and gave it to his son, who was entranced by the technology. Overnight, the son became cool, carrying the loaned Kindle to school—and finishing the book in a matter of days after months of wrangling.

But here’s the thing: The technology might have gotten the kid into the book, but it was the story that kept him there. While the language is complex and certainly different from much of what kids read today, Dickens’ power as a storyteller is still as compelling as ever.

I tried to contact Amazon about this because I was fascinated by the impact of this technology and wondered if they had any other examples of how technology is driving reading. All I got was stony silence and unreturned phone calls. So I have no idea whether or not this was an isolated incident. To be honest, few families are going to shell out $350 to get a kid to complete his schoolwork, but it is intriguing to see that the 19^th Century writers still have relevance to 21^st Century kids—if we can get them into it.

The young man in question did not get to keep his dad’s Kindle, though they share it from time to time. He did, however, download the Kindle App (free) to his iPod Touch and has just read “Hard Times” (99 cents) and is about to start on Mark Twain (also 99 cents), much to his parents’ delight.

Play Categories: Advice, Opinions, Summer Semester

By Christopher Byrne (Follow Me on Twitter)

Last week, I spoke about the need to be active, and I heard from tons of people who remember with fondness the ready accessibility of firecrackers, M-80s, cherry bombs and the like.

And, hey, did you know that there are places that are trying to get rid of sparklers as well? These most benign of fireworks—the ones that the little kids played with—are getting banned. It’s not that kids don’t want this stuff. A bunch of us grownups were sharing our explosive experiences with some kids last weekend, and the envy in their little hearts was palpable. Bottom line: Boys love to blow things up, and while they have to settle for the virtual explosions in video games and movies, I can’t help but think that something is lost by a generation that will be less likely to know what it’s like to light a fuse and high tail it to safety.

But, summer is not just pyrotechnics. In fact, the best part of summer vacation can, and should, be a collection of balanced experiences for kids that complement one another. And that includes reading.

When I was a kid, my school had a required summer reading list—usually about 5 or 6 books that would figure somehow in the curricula for the next year. My parents were avid readers, and we read a loud as a family. Our summer reading list was just the beginning of our summer reading.

I can remember hours spent under trees reading away a sultry summer afternoon. The public library was a favorite haunt—largely because it was a big, dark cool building, and we didn’t have air conditioning in our house. I would take the bus downtown (yes, alone) and send hours looking for just the right next book to read. And it wasn’t just kids’ stuff either. My parents were both teachers, so they set a pretty high bar for what we would read, alone or as a family. As a result, I read Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and, when a little younger, The Hardy Boys and most of the 15 Oz books by L. Frank Baum. But it wasn’t just that I read this stuff, I talked about it with my parents, particularly my mother. She took an interest in what we were reading, and guided us towards some of her favorite books. When we went on vacation, there was no TV, and this was before video games, so we went at least two weeks with no screen time at all.

I know this must sound quaint, but here’s why it’s important to encourage kids to read. First and foremost, it helps them to be better students, to absorb information, to see things in their minds’ eyes. This is a critical skill. Whether it’s reading a text book or being shaken to the bones by The Shining, the power of imagination is essential to virtually any academic discipline.

It’s particularly important for young kids—especially between third and fourth grades—when they make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Reading for pleasure reinforces this skill and makes it easier for kids to process information as readers.

Best of all, books offer a world of entertainment and imagination that makes the most of the most advanced entertainment medium of all—our minds. As the author Lemoney Snicket said to me when discussing the movie based on his books, “It’s one thing to write, ‘And then the house fell off a cliff.’ It’s quite another to watch someone try to make that happen in a movie.’” As readers, kids enter unique worlds that are brought to life by their unique imaginations. That opens the door to individuality both personally and of expression.

How do you get your kids to read? I get asked that a lot. I think showing them that it’s something you value and that you do is very powerful. Most importantly, though, give kids things they want to read. The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer, for example, is all the rage with a lot of kids. I’ve seen too many reading lists for kids that have novels that were dated when I was a kid. Encourage your kids’ teachers to update their lists as well.

You also need to understand that between video games, DVDs, TV and the internet, kids have a lot of entertainment choices today. Encourage books and reading as one of those.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports lately, and while travel can be demanding, the kids I see who are the best behaved are those who are curled up with their parents—even when flights are delayed—and they’re all reading.

Make it fun. Make it frequent, and make it part of a whole summer of activity, and you’ll probably be surprised at how kids react.

NEXT: How Amazon’s Kindle settled a family battle—and got one teen hooked on A Tale of Two Cities.

Play Categories: Advice, Opinions, Summer Semester

By Christopher Byrne (Follow me on twitter)

A lot has changed since I was a kid. You probably don’t want to know this, but we had ready access to cherry bombs, M-80s and other things that blew up. A pack of matches, the gas can out of the garage and a bucket of army men was enough to entertain us for the afternoon. Left to our own devices, we had many a wonderful day, and without ongoing parental supervision, well…let’s just say it’s a good thing we all have all our fingers and toes. But it does strike me as alarming that with all the constant mini-explosions going on in our neighborhood (53 kids under 13 spread out over two city blocks), that no adults ever seemed to be worried. “Be careful,” “Outdoors with that,” and “Not near the cat,” were the most dire warnings we got. We were turned outdoors after breakfast, expected back for lunch and had to come in after the street lights came on.  It’s not like that today.

One thing, though, was that as “wild” as we were—we were good kids—but we were active! Bikes, sports, climbing, racing around, playing “war” and generally being on the go from morning till night. (We also took time to read and relax, but that’s next week’s column.) We ran in groups of 4, 6 or more, and games of hide and seek that involved a dozen or more kids were common. (We actually played in the Mount Salem Cemetery at the head of the street and called the game “Graveyard Creeps.”)

That, as they say, was then.

Today’s kids have fewer options to be as active, and don’t have a ready-made gang of kids out the back door as often. Organized activities take up more time, with camps, school programs and the like. And the computer and video game consoles are time suckers. It’s hard because many parents are caught between the desire to tell kids to get out and play and the desire to keep them well supervised.

But kids also need to get out and play, particularly with their peers. They need the physical activity, and they need the opportunity to resolve issues and share experiences with their peers. They need to have an argument or two, to test boundaries because all of these begin to give them a sense of themselves both in the context of their world and as themselves.

I recently had the chance to talk to the famous decathlete Dan O’Brien. O’Brien took gold in the decathlon in the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, and won many titles after that. Today, he is an outspoken advocate for kids’ fitness, and recently teamed up with Crayola to break the world hopscotch record. (Bet you didn’t’ know that existed?)

While O’Brien made his name in organized athletics, he believes that kids need open-ended play and they need to be imaginatively engaged in order to stay active.

“There’s a lot of structure out there to sports and play, and that’s when kids lose interest.” O’Brien say. Organized activities, he adds, can often have too much structure and too many rules and doesn’t allow space for the children’s imaginations.  “Get them outside and they make up their own games and their own rules,” he advises.

He says, that a goal should be to all kids “to be present and be in the moment and finding ways to be creative, but we often take that away from kids and expect them to get in shape and get better.

“Kids are going to have fun if you let them be creative, and that was the one thing I learned from Crayola. There were 30 kids who showed up and they were given a whole bunch of sidewalk chalk and they were told to go for it. They had written on every level surface, and they were running around. Some were athletic, some were artistic, and every kid found something to do. I really could see that it was just letting them do what they wanted to do instead of just what they should do.”

That pretty much describes the experience of my peers and myself. We made up all kinds of games. We argued and made up. We were mortal enemies and best friends—sometimes in the same afternoon. Without adults telling us “how” or “when,” we filled the days with activity.

Years later, my mother admitted that her heart was in her throat when she came outside and saw my friends Nina, Jim and me climbing around in a tree 20 feet off the ground, but she also trusted us to get down safely, which we did, and which we never doubted for a second.

It really is about calculated risks, and there may be some bumps and scrapes along the way. Even a few broken bones. Those all heal, but what’s built instead is a sense of confidence and an ability to create one’s own fun that lasts a lifetime.

However, I really do recommend keeping the gas can and matches locked up.

Play Categories: Advice, Experiences, Opinions, Summer Semester