Most kids learn to read by 6 or 7 years of age. But at just 8, Professor Robert McNees’ daughter already can’t live without it. She even uses literature as a way to revolt against the system. Or at least she thinks so.
You see, the girl likes to pick up a book past her bedtime. Under the covers, with a flashlight. And it’s easy to understand why: both pushing boundaries and a good story can be really exciting. However, both are part of Mr. McNees’ master plan, too.
To Twitter users’ delight, the father unveiled it on the 13th of August.
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Mr. McNees said he would describe his daughter’s personality pretty much the same way a lot of parents would describe their 8-year-olds. “She is outgoing, empathetic, curious, and a little wild sometimes,” the professor told Bored Panda. “She likes chatting with her friends, playing Minecraft, and watching TV shows and movies. Like most kids her age, she is distractible, but when something really gets her attention she’s a laser. And she loves to make things. Sometimes she will just disappear into her room and emerge a few hours later with a handwritten recipe book or an entire dollhouse made of cardboard boxes.”
The little girl started recognizing words when she was about four years old, and has been reading chapter books on her own for the last few years. “We read a lot, on our own and with her, so there are always stacks of books around. Her mom is a writer, which I think contributed to her curiosity about reading,” Mr. McNees explained. “When she did her first book report for school last year it was a Boxcar Children book that her mom wrote; she was so proud.”
However, the father cant say for sure how his daughter learned to read. “It seemed like it happened by osmosis. She would pore over books on her own, sometimes asking for help with words, and we would trace the lines on the page with our finger when reading to her.”
Reacting to the amusing tweet, people started telling their own similar stories
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The parents also had access to lots of books that were visually interesting, age-appropriate, and suited to her reading level. A” lot of the credit for that goes to her grandmother, who has a pretty keen eye for those things. She has sent us more books than I can count and all of them were wonderful.”
“Since the pandemic got underway in March, her big thing has been Harry Potter. She read the third, fourth, and fifth books. We started off reading them together, one chapter per night. But then she’d trudge off to bed with the book under her arm and the next morning she would be three or four chapters ahead of where we left off. So we finally just turned her loose and let her read them on her own. Right now, we are reading the sixth book together, because the story has gotten darker and we want to be able to talk to her about it as things happen. We’ll read a chapter or two before bed, and then she’ll pull out the flashlight and revisit one of the first five books.”
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A few weeks ago, the girl completed “A Wrinkle in Time” with her mom. “She has also read some Boxcar Children books this summer, the first six or seven Babysitters Club books, “Ada Twist and the Perilous Pants” from Andrea Beaty’s Questioneers series, “The Twits” by Roald Dahl, some King Arthur stories, and a bunch of comic books (Teen Titans Go, DC Superhero Girls). She usually has a few Disney story collections and “Princess In Black” books on her top bunk, too.”
As his tweet was going viral, Mr. McNeesI couldn’t keep up with all the responses. “Most of the ones I saw were very sweet notes of appreciation, or folks just now realizing that a parent did the same thing for them. It’s nice seeing book lovers reminisce about how they pulled off their childhood reading capers — I think my favorite was the person who would crawl all the way underneath their bed, where they could read next to a nightlight without being seen.”
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Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, and Maria Russo, the children’s books editor of The New York Times Book Review, said that in order to raise a reader, a parent must be a reader.
According to the co-authors of How to Raise a Reader, even newborns benefit from hearing stories, and moms and dads should take advantage of that by reading to them out loud, every day, any book. “You can read anything to a newborn: a cookbook, a dystopian novel, a parenting manual. The content doesn’t matter. What does matter is the sound of your voice, the cadence of the text, and the words themselves,” Paul and Russo wrote.
“Research has shown that the number of words an infant is exposed to has a direct impact on language development and literacy. But here’s the catch: The language has to be live, in-person and directed at the child. Turning on a television, or even an audiobook, doesn’t count.”
Babies learn that reading is fun by being read to. It’s as simple as that. They experience it through all the senses: the feel of the pages, the smell of the glue, the visuals of the illustrations as well as the sound of the parent’s voice.
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"hack" is not synonymous with "tip" despite its frequent misuse a hack is using something for a purpose that wasn't intended to produce favorable outcomes this article is full of tips not one hack in the bunch
I'm not an emotional person, but reading these posts made me cry. I applaud these parents. We need more like them.
Unfortunately for me my parents didn’t care even if I was reading I still wasn’t allowed to stay up late. And my batteries did run out. I had to actually be quiet and pretend I was asleep. My parents yelled at me when I got caught so I doubt they were faking it
Load More Replies...Wow, my mum would shout and threaten me if she saw light from my lamp at night. They said I read too much and it wasn't normal 😑
Relatable! I don't think reading can ever be bad, unless it's like, wayy to much. My parents almost tried to take me to a 'specialist', or so they said xD
Load More Replies...My son has thankfully inherited my love of reading. If left to his own devises he would stay up for hours past bedtime reading. On weekends it's no big deal but on school nights once he hears my shower turn off he has to turn off the light.
Good on you, Courtney. I think it's great that you encourage reading, but also that he must get a good night's sleep too.
Load More Replies...Read heaps after bedtime cause the hall light was left on for my sister. Pretty sure my mum didnt mind but one time my dad caught me, yelled at me, and threw my book on the floor. It was an old book and lots of the pages were loose so they went everywhere.
That’s so sad. He sounds like the dad from “Matilda”.
Load More Replies...I was in a church cult growing up.. There were no TV's/ ECT. So for years all there really was would be a lot of intense chores and books. Also the books couldn't have magic in them ECT. Eventually we were allowed documentaries to watch down the road. When you don't have TV for years those educational videos are amazing!! 😂 lol Anyways I left when I was 17. Lol .. My brother and sister in law raised me so for the best I left.
My parents don't like that I read novels. They always want me to read big science books or whatever. They never seem to be happy that at least I like reading, unlike most kids my age.
My grandma didn't do this, as I was only 6 when she died, but these remind me of my grandma, a retired teacher of 35 years. She LOVED reading with me and turned me into the reader I am today. Because of her, I was alway ahead of my class reading and when I was 8 years old I was reading Preteen books and 12+ books. THANK YOU GRANDMA!
I had ADD or executive function disorder or something that made reading overwhelming as a kid. I remember looking through the pages of a picture book with just a few sentences on each page and thinking it was just too long to read. It makes me sad now. I didn't start enjoying reading until I was about 13 when I found a youth author I really liked. It was still overwhelming. I would divide the book up to read in a week and set post-it notes for daily stop points, but I always went past the post-its everyday. I read those books over and over and I am grateful to that author for enabling me to finally enjoy reading. (They were mormon fiction book by Jack Weyland. I'm not mormon now, but I still flipping love those books.)
i remember being so broke raising my son that it was often hard to decide which groceries to buy. but, i had made him a promise: i would always find the money for a book if they didn't have it at the library or he just wanted it for his own. i cashed in aluminum cans, brass, yard sale, etc. to make sure i had a little bank for this. even when he was in his 20s and a book came out and he was tight with his money he would ask if i could lend him the money for it. no lending...a promise is a promise.
Oh this post is so sweet! I applaud all these parents! My parents were strict as stone about bed times, so I did really have to sneak, or else I would've been yelled at for staying up on a school night 😅 I may or may not have stolen my dad's flashlight to stay up for hours reading random books around the house 😂 Good memories :)
I always loved reading, I was reading shortly after I could speak full sentences. My dad started reading me small books, and moved up to the old ‘Fancy Nancy’ books, which as you probably don’t know have certain french words in them. Eventually when I was about 6 or 7, he taught me the word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (Wow I spelled that right first try, I even looked it up!). My parents now have to do the opposite, and get me to stop reading so I will come eat lunch, or go to bed.
I've lost count of the number of nights I've turned off lights, removed glasses, and coaxed asleep children off of open books or piles of books hours after 'bedtime', and I couldn't be happier about it.
I never had to sneak because well my Mom was blind so she couldn't see the lights LOL but she knew... I was never denied books and often my mom would carefully cover my paperback in clear contact paper to protect them. Now I have a 12 year old. I might tell him no about some game or electronic but if he asks for a book I will get it for him :)
My parents wouldn't let me read, since "there is no job for readers". Whenever they were in crisis for other subjects of conflict they were using this. And that was the beginning: all my life the courses I tried to attend (informatics, spanish etc.) were suddenly cancelled.
That is terrible. I am so sorry. Are you Romanian? My work friend is too, and she says that parents there are terribly practical, even down on the arts. She thinks it comes from so many years of struggle and oppression under communist rule. But now you are grown, and it is never too late for a love of reading!
Load More Replies...NEEERRRDD! In all seriousness, keep it up. I don't read books often but I do when they're enjoyable. Please tell me that I'm not the only person that thinks forcing kids to read is not how to go about it. Let them learn to love it, do not cram it down their throats.
My dad used to check our windows late at night and yell "lights out" if it was really late. 1) By the time he started doing this, we were already avid readers, and he figured we really did sometimes need to get enough sleep. 2) by the time my older brother was about 13, he had discovered blacking out his window. I followed suit soon after. 3) the rule in our house was that we could read any book in the house, no exceptions; thus a love of science fiction at a young age. 4) My parents got used to teachers calling them to tell them about our "inappropriate" reading matter. The poor teachers got their ears pinned back big time. I could go on, but it's enough to say that my parents were A++++ parents, and not just about reading.
Here I’ve been congratulating myself the last few years for turning subtitles on the cartoons and accidentally teaching my 4yo to read…. I guess I’m not a super mom after all 😂
What kind of lamp do you need to catch your blanket on fire? was it a oil lamp?
My aunts read to me at nite. I was reading their books when I started 1st grade :-) Fairy-tales, but, you know.......... My eldest loved to be read to, but my youngest chose to read to himself by the time he was 6. He took Stephen King's "It" and read it after I said "not this one, son". SCHOOL made him stop reading - in 4th grade - a teacher who demanded more books than most kids could consume in a short-short. He learned to read the front, back, first and last chapters to do book reports. So sad.
Was I the only one whose parents got truly angry when I stayed up late reading? I remember my mom shouting every time when she caught me. Btw I'm still a bookworm, but I wish I had these kind of parents.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on my Dad's lap while he read The Wall Street Journal out loud to me (we were your classic "kids have eaten and are ready for bed when Dad comes home Catholic families). He had the most beautiful sonorous voice & I often fell asleep, I was about 3. By 4, I was way beyond "D**k & Jane" and actually finished my first chapter book "Black Beauty" when I was about 7. He & my Mom were both huge readers & I got the bug early. I'm 57 now and have my own home library of close to 800 hardbacks (I have another 250 or so on Kindle). IMG_202008...456616.jpg
My parents raised 4 daughters and all are voracious readers! We love books, kindle, snd trade when we can. Ice even mailed new books to them I know they would like! We are now all above 50 and still reading ! Both parents are gone, but are proud of us. We would rather read than play outside!!
When I was a kid I loved to read. My parents never told me not to read after bedtime and more than once I fell asleep reading. Unfortunately I lost my love for reading once I hit puberty, also because of all the book reports on boring novels. Christmas of 2002 my mom did buy me a book as a Christmas present and since then I've regained my love in reading. So I have to thank my mom for giving me this amazing gift.
my stepmom caught my sister reading after bedtime and she told her "God spits in your face and shits on your head." good stuff.
I love this post! My mother was an avid reader, and tried her best to instill that love of reading in all 4 of her kids. I was the only one that really ran with it. When I was 1 year old, she would put me on the sofa with a stack of books beside me, and then go do housework, checking on me now and then. I would sit there, going through every single book, page by page, then close it and place it on the other side of me on the sofa, until I'd gone through the whole stack - then I'd reverse the process and do it all over again. I was reading at a 3rd grade level by the time I was 5, and a 12th grade level by the time I was 8.
I used reverse strategy to get my children to do the things they needed to do and also love reading. They would be told that they had to have jammies on, teeth brushed, backpacks ready for school next day but if they did it by the time I told them it had to be done, they could have a bedtime story. If they couldn't get their chores done, no stories! Never had issues getting bedtime routines completed and always got to spend special time reading to them every night.
"hack" is not synonymous with "tip" despite its frequent misuse a hack is using something for a purpose that wasn't intended to produce favorable outcomes this article is full of tips not one hack in the bunch
I'm not an emotional person, but reading these posts made me cry. I applaud these parents. We need more like them.
Unfortunately for me my parents didn’t care even if I was reading I still wasn’t allowed to stay up late. And my batteries did run out. I had to actually be quiet and pretend I was asleep. My parents yelled at me when I got caught so I doubt they were faking it
Load More Replies...Wow, my mum would shout and threaten me if she saw light from my lamp at night. They said I read too much and it wasn't normal 😑
Relatable! I don't think reading can ever be bad, unless it's like, wayy to much. My parents almost tried to take me to a 'specialist', or so they said xD
Load More Replies...My son has thankfully inherited my love of reading. If left to his own devises he would stay up for hours past bedtime reading. On weekends it's no big deal but on school nights once he hears my shower turn off he has to turn off the light.
Good on you, Courtney. I think it's great that you encourage reading, but also that he must get a good night's sleep too.
Load More Replies...Read heaps after bedtime cause the hall light was left on for my sister. Pretty sure my mum didnt mind but one time my dad caught me, yelled at me, and threw my book on the floor. It was an old book and lots of the pages were loose so they went everywhere.
That’s so sad. He sounds like the dad from “Matilda”.
Load More Replies...I was in a church cult growing up.. There were no TV's/ ECT. So for years all there really was would be a lot of intense chores and books. Also the books couldn't have magic in them ECT. Eventually we were allowed documentaries to watch down the road. When you don't have TV for years those educational videos are amazing!! 😂 lol Anyways I left when I was 17. Lol .. My brother and sister in law raised me so for the best I left.
My parents don't like that I read novels. They always want me to read big science books or whatever. They never seem to be happy that at least I like reading, unlike most kids my age.
My grandma didn't do this, as I was only 6 when she died, but these remind me of my grandma, a retired teacher of 35 years. She LOVED reading with me and turned me into the reader I am today. Because of her, I was alway ahead of my class reading and when I was 8 years old I was reading Preteen books and 12+ books. THANK YOU GRANDMA!
I had ADD or executive function disorder or something that made reading overwhelming as a kid. I remember looking through the pages of a picture book with just a few sentences on each page and thinking it was just too long to read. It makes me sad now. I didn't start enjoying reading until I was about 13 when I found a youth author I really liked. It was still overwhelming. I would divide the book up to read in a week and set post-it notes for daily stop points, but I always went past the post-its everyday. I read those books over and over and I am grateful to that author for enabling me to finally enjoy reading. (They were mormon fiction book by Jack Weyland. I'm not mormon now, but I still flipping love those books.)
i remember being so broke raising my son that it was often hard to decide which groceries to buy. but, i had made him a promise: i would always find the money for a book if they didn't have it at the library or he just wanted it for his own. i cashed in aluminum cans, brass, yard sale, etc. to make sure i had a little bank for this. even when he was in his 20s and a book came out and he was tight with his money he would ask if i could lend him the money for it. no lending...a promise is a promise.
Oh this post is so sweet! I applaud all these parents! My parents were strict as stone about bed times, so I did really have to sneak, or else I would've been yelled at for staying up on a school night 😅 I may or may not have stolen my dad's flashlight to stay up for hours reading random books around the house 😂 Good memories :)
I always loved reading, I was reading shortly after I could speak full sentences. My dad started reading me small books, and moved up to the old ‘Fancy Nancy’ books, which as you probably don’t know have certain french words in them. Eventually when I was about 6 or 7, he taught me the word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (Wow I spelled that right first try, I even looked it up!). My parents now have to do the opposite, and get me to stop reading so I will come eat lunch, or go to bed.
I've lost count of the number of nights I've turned off lights, removed glasses, and coaxed asleep children off of open books or piles of books hours after 'bedtime', and I couldn't be happier about it.
I never had to sneak because well my Mom was blind so she couldn't see the lights LOL but she knew... I was never denied books and often my mom would carefully cover my paperback in clear contact paper to protect them. Now I have a 12 year old. I might tell him no about some game or electronic but if he asks for a book I will get it for him :)
My parents wouldn't let me read, since "there is no job for readers". Whenever they were in crisis for other subjects of conflict they were using this. And that was the beginning: all my life the courses I tried to attend (informatics, spanish etc.) were suddenly cancelled.
That is terrible. I am so sorry. Are you Romanian? My work friend is too, and she says that parents there are terribly practical, even down on the arts. She thinks it comes from so many years of struggle and oppression under communist rule. But now you are grown, and it is never too late for a love of reading!
Load More Replies...NEEERRRDD! In all seriousness, keep it up. I don't read books often but I do when they're enjoyable. Please tell me that I'm not the only person that thinks forcing kids to read is not how to go about it. Let them learn to love it, do not cram it down their throats.
My dad used to check our windows late at night and yell "lights out" if it was really late. 1) By the time he started doing this, we were already avid readers, and he figured we really did sometimes need to get enough sleep. 2) by the time my older brother was about 13, he had discovered blacking out his window. I followed suit soon after. 3) the rule in our house was that we could read any book in the house, no exceptions; thus a love of science fiction at a young age. 4) My parents got used to teachers calling them to tell them about our "inappropriate" reading matter. The poor teachers got their ears pinned back big time. I could go on, but it's enough to say that my parents were A++++ parents, and not just about reading.
Here I’ve been congratulating myself the last few years for turning subtitles on the cartoons and accidentally teaching my 4yo to read…. I guess I’m not a super mom after all 😂
What kind of lamp do you need to catch your blanket on fire? was it a oil lamp?
My aunts read to me at nite. I was reading their books when I started 1st grade :-) Fairy-tales, but, you know.......... My eldest loved to be read to, but my youngest chose to read to himself by the time he was 6. He took Stephen King's "It" and read it after I said "not this one, son". SCHOOL made him stop reading - in 4th grade - a teacher who demanded more books than most kids could consume in a short-short. He learned to read the front, back, first and last chapters to do book reports. So sad.
Was I the only one whose parents got truly angry when I stayed up late reading? I remember my mom shouting every time when she caught me. Btw I'm still a bookworm, but I wish I had these kind of parents.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on my Dad's lap while he read The Wall Street Journal out loud to me (we were your classic "kids have eaten and are ready for bed when Dad comes home Catholic families). He had the most beautiful sonorous voice & I often fell asleep, I was about 3. By 4, I was way beyond "D**k & Jane" and actually finished my first chapter book "Black Beauty" when I was about 7. He & my Mom were both huge readers & I got the bug early. I'm 57 now and have my own home library of close to 800 hardbacks (I have another 250 or so on Kindle). IMG_202008...456616.jpg
My parents raised 4 daughters and all are voracious readers! We love books, kindle, snd trade when we can. Ice even mailed new books to them I know they would like! We are now all above 50 and still reading ! Both parents are gone, but are proud of us. We would rather read than play outside!!
When I was a kid I loved to read. My parents never told me not to read after bedtime and more than once I fell asleep reading. Unfortunately I lost my love for reading once I hit puberty, also because of all the book reports on boring novels. Christmas of 2002 my mom did buy me a book as a Christmas present and since then I've regained my love in reading. So I have to thank my mom for giving me this amazing gift.
my stepmom caught my sister reading after bedtime and she told her "God spits in your face and shits on your head." good stuff.
I love this post! My mother was an avid reader, and tried her best to instill that love of reading in all 4 of her kids. I was the only one that really ran with it. When I was 1 year old, she would put me on the sofa with a stack of books beside me, and then go do housework, checking on me now and then. I would sit there, going through every single book, page by page, then close it and place it on the other side of me on the sofa, until I'd gone through the whole stack - then I'd reverse the process and do it all over again. I was reading at a 3rd grade level by the time I was 5, and a 12th grade level by the time I was 8.
I used reverse strategy to get my children to do the things they needed to do and also love reading. They would be told that they had to have jammies on, teeth brushed, backpacks ready for school next day but if they did it by the time I told them it had to be done, they could have a bedtime story. If they couldn't get their chores done, no stories! Never had issues getting bedtime routines completed and always got to spend special time reading to them every night.
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