I’m often struck by how interested nonreaders, or early beginning readers, or readers who are having difficulty in reading how interested they are in my books. And they remind me of a story that a teacher told me. The boy was reading a book about snakes, and he was lying on the floor and wiggling back and forth. And his teacher said to him, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m a sidewinder moving across the sands of the desert.” And she told me later that that was the first book he ever asked to be read to him, and carried it around because he was so proud that he knew about all of the pictures in the book.
I think it’s important that we get the interest of a nonreader before we try to teach them how to read. And all of my early books that is, the younger books are so geared that if a child picks them up, he’s going to be fascinated by the photographs, and he will want to know what is it in this photograph that he’s seeing. Many of them ask to be read to, and many of them learn to read because they have the same page read to them time and time again.
