Thank you to everyone who was involved in putting together the Literacy Workshop with Diane Frankenstein. My husband and I are avid readers, so going into the workshop I was anxious and excited to find out and learn what we could implement or change in our home that would help us, help our children find and keep their love for learning.
I left the workshop completely enthusiastic. As soon as I got home I took a few moments to review page 16 of Reading Together and chose a question I would use to initiate a conversation with our daughters.
I then asked our girls to look at the pictures of the book, Unlovable, and to tell me what they believed was happening. When I finished reading the book, magic happened. I utilized one of Diane Frankenstein’s conversation starters and changed it up a bit. Instead of asking our daughter’s “What would you do in this situation,” I asked them “if Alfred (the dog) was a child, and the other animals were children what would you do in this situation? Our five-year-old daughter, Zoë, became extremely emotional. She said, “Mom, don’t they know that everyone belongs? That it does not matter what we look like on the outside, because we are all the same on the inside? The conversation evolved from there.
It turned into a long successful conversation about how “judging” and treating individuals “different” because of the way they look is unacceptable. The conversation brought our little family together in an amazing way. It was also a joyous moment for us that there were questions we could ask that would help our kids get more from the books they read and continue their love of reading.
