The Great Green Room: Reading Warriors

As good parents, we encourage our kids to find their own path, their passion, that thing they love. But, all along, we're hoping that that thing will just so happen to be the same thing we love.

For me that thing is reading and that's one of the passions I'm rooting for for my kids.

Although he'll listen to books all day, my son has always leaned a little towards the reluctant end of the reading spectrum. He reads quite a bit, but mostly because I require it. He does it more dutifully than enthusiastically.

There have been bursts of enthusiasm over certain books, mostly those in a series. I remember Dav Pilkey's Ricky Ricotta books as being the first series he requested over and over

He later showed some inclination toward The Magic Treehouse series

and The Secrets of Droon.

He read these with more eagerness than usual, but those tell-tale sign of a reader in love were not there...the reading into the night, the toting of books to places books don't belong (e.g. baseball practice), the suspension of all other interests.

But this year his cousin recommended the Erin Hunter's Warriors series to him, and I began to see book-wormish signs. From the first book, he began clamoring, begging, and wheedling for these books and was devouring them in short order.