How to be a Good Reader

Kate Tigue is the Head of Youth Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the March 28, 2019 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin. 

If you’re reading this, you can definitely read!  Congratulations! So why do you need advice on how to be a good reader? Reading aloud, especially to children, is skill that looks deceptively easy but requires a great deal of finesse to do well. We are in the age of the “guest” or “mystery” reader.  It’s quite common now for relatives to be invited into a classroom setting to read aloud. In the Children’s Room, I field many questions from terrified grown-ups about what books they should read to their child’s or grandchild’s class.

Recent studies show strong evidence that reading aloud to children of all ages is critical to maintain literacy skills, even for children who are independent readers. Many adults forget the joy of being read to and stop reading aloud to children once they can read themselves. As parents,we are all crunched for time but making time for bedtime stories is important for several reasons. Reading provides a wonderful bonding time between parents and children that older children still crave.

Children Who Fall Far from the Tree

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the March 21, 2019 edition of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

            When Alice fell down the rabbit hole in her Adventures in Wonderland, she was chasing the White Rabbit. When I fall down into a rabbit hole, it, too, means that my own White Rabbit, or curiosity, has gotten the best of me. I’ve been known to lose significant chunks of time only to reappear to meet my demands in life. As a college student, this happened in the library - either in the drawers of extensive card catalogs or in the endless mazes of the book stacks. Sometimes, I surrounded myself with so many massive volumes of the Reader’s Guide(s) to Periodical Literature that I was not only figuratively, but literally, lost among them.

Kick, Punch - It's All in the Mind

Brian DeFelice is the Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood. Read his column in the March 14, 2019 edition of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

The sparring gear I was wearing made my body feel twenty times hotter than the dojang that I was sparring in. I was fighting a guy who was slightly older than me in terms of age, but light years ahead of me in terms of skill. I wasn’t just sweating because of the heat; adrenaline was pumping through my veins, my mind was in high alert, and sparring is nothing like doing drills. With drills, you are kicking pads or punching into the air at your reflection in the mirror or at some phantom opponent in your mind. In sparring, you are simulating a real fight, with a real person, who can really hurt you, which is simultaneously exciting and nerve wracking.

I remember trying to get in a few roundhouse kicks to to his chest, and at one point even tried to land a crescent kick to his head, but he was FAST, and was using the best weapons in his arsenal to combat me: his mind and his experience. It seems as if he could read my every move before I even made it. I kept trying to land blows, but it was to no avail, until I saw an opening! I  had dodged one of his back kicks, which I thought was a mistake on his part, which left his back exposed for a moment so I went in with a front kick to land a blow.

Sunbathing in Haiti, Surfing in Nicaragua

Lydia Sampson is the Technical Services department head at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read her column in the March 7, 2019 issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

It was the summer of 2010 - one of my all-time favorite travel memories. A small rowboat carried me and my friend to a pristine beach cove, as beautiful as any postcard from a tropical paradise anywhere in the world. We had the entire palm-lined shore to ourselves, to sunbathe, look for shells, and swim in calm tepid water. At some point a man with a sack of fresh mangos rowed up to the cove and sold some to us for about ten cents each, then rowed along to his next stop. The day couldn’t have been more perfect after an exhausting week of hard work and heartbreak. I should mention, we were in Haiti, six months after the devastating earthquake of 2010.