We Scream for Ice Cream … and Reading!
by Judy Newman
My favorite ice cream flavor—hands down—is vanilla chocolate chip. I do like other options in the chip family: raspberry chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and peppermint chip. But since my childhood days of Friendly’s, Brigham’s, and Steve’s Ice Cream in Somerville, MA—before all the fancy small batch flavors came to market—vanilla chocolate chip has always been my flavor of choice.
This week, Sophie Rae, almost four, already an ice cream aficionado, prefers strawberry. She likes a few baby marshmallows and a few chocolate chips buried in the middle of her cone. She also likes to have a second scoop. Two weeks ago, fudge swirl was her chosen flavor to sit on top of her strawberry base. The week before it was raspberry sorbet. By the end of the summer, she will have chosen a few more second-place flavors and it’s even possible strawberry will get knocked off the #1 favorite spot.
Deciding which ice cream to put in your cone is serious business. We take all the ice cream cartons out of the freezer—even the ones with only a few shards of ice cream left in them that no one wants to throw out—and conduct an official taste test to determine what makes it into the cone.
Flavor by flavor, we each take a small spoonful and then Sophie marks our reactions—or X—in each box on the chart.
Once we’ve cataloged our preferences, we put together double (or sometimes triple) scoop cones. We channel Steve Herrell and the “Smoosh-In™” he invented when he opened Steve’s Ice Cream in Somerville, MA in 1973. We insert our own add-ins: baby marshmallows, chocolate chips, and jelly beans in between the scoops. Delicious and fun!
Sophie’s continuously evolving preference for ice cream mirrors her continuously evolving preference—and hunger—for the books she wants us to read with her. My goal for Sophie Rae—and for all children—is to make reading aloud and reading together (and eventually reading independently) as fun and delicious and reflective and respectful of her personal preferences as her adventures in ice cream. If she doesn’t like the taste of what she’s reading, she’s not going to want to read that book, and if a book she doesn’t like or isn’t comfortable reading is forced on her, she may get turned off from reading altogether.
At the beginning of the summer, Sophie chose Hot Dog by Doug Salati to read every day. Goodnight Hairiette by Tanya Wright has been a favorite all summer and Sophie can recite whole passages of the story of Hairiette’s grandmother growing up in Graytown from memory.
At the beginning of the summer, she wasn’t so interested in Millie Fleur’s Poison Garden but now she loves it and requests it again and again. Millie Fleur joins The Little Engine That Could—a very different book—as one of Sophie’s favorites.
It’s hard to get kids interested in reading when there is so much else going on around them. My message this summer—and all year round—is: Use every opportunity to insert a book into your day. And go with your child’s preferences. Follow their lead on which books they are interested in and want to read. Don’t insist they read one book or another. Let them choose!
There are also lots of great books about ice cream which are fun to read when you’re eating a delicious cone with two scoops and hidden add-ins. But any book about any topic can make a great summer read. Here are some I’ve found:
The key to helping every child develop their self-confidence as a reader is to follow their lead. Let them choose which books they want to read. And if they want to eat their cones while reading—even if some of that strawberry/fudge swirl combo with marshmallows tucked inside drips on the pages—that’s OK! It all contributes to making reading a fun and happy time together, building a solid foundation for your child to declare: “I am a reader.”
Happy Reading!
Judy
Judy Newman, Chief Impact Officer, Scholastic