Teaching Children to Choose
One of the challenges for children in growing from emergent readers into lifelong, avid, joyful readers is figuring out how to find books they will love when there are so many from which to choose.
The curse of book abundance
The “curse” of having too many choices is one that children must be taught to embrace rather than turn away and give up because they don’t know where to start. One of our job’s as caring adults is to help children learn how to make good choices, which includes how to choose books they’ll enjoy from the endless smorgasbord of offerings.
Indeed, inviting children to select books is very much like taking them to a buffet-style cafeteria and suggesting that they select their own food. Their first impulse may be to enthusiastically take some of everything or they may feel overwhelmed. Both of those are natural responses.
We must teach children that it’s okay to select something, sample a bit of it, and if it doesn’t suit them, simply move on to the next option. In a cafeteria they must learn to take just a little until they find what tastes really good to them. In a library they need to be shown how one samples a book to see if it “feels” just right.
Readers are leaders
Children need to learn how to evaluate a book to see if it’s appealing to them, taking time to “taste” it and to decided if it will satiate their hunger for knowledge or adventure.
Educators and librarians can easily teach children how to sample books by showing them how we take a book off a shelf, look at the cover, page through it, and then either put it under our arm to take home or put it back for other readers to discover.
Time permitting (and we should always permit time for book selection), we also can read part of the book and then decide that it’s right or move on to another. Additionally, we should allow children the opportunity to discard a poor book choice in favor of a better one. Being stuck with a book that doesn’t deliver what they had hoped for until some next-scheduled library visit can extinguish the urge to even try to find a good one.
Children who have been taught and encouraged to choose good reads grow into fulfilled, avid readers.