Going into the Boulder Public Library for the first day of reading buddies I was eager to meet and help shape my little buddy as a reader. However, what I have found is that Alexas has shaped me to be her ideal mentor. She is a bubbly six-year-old with blond hair and huge blue eyes. She has a happy go lucky attitude and does what she pleases as long as it complies with the library rules. Every time she arrives she always has a big smile and gives me an even bigger hug. She admires her brother a great deal, which is apparent from the stories she tells about him and her desire to sit near him during our sessions. Her brother, Nick, is a very good reader and I think that motivates Alexas’s desire to read.
A part of Alexas’s personality is revealed to me during every story I read to her. While reading Pinkalicious by Victoria Kann I learned that Alexas is a ballerina because she demonstrated what the word “pirouette” means when we read it in the book. That was the first day and still she will twirl around the library as we go to pick out books. I have also learned how insightful she is. She is constantly making predictions about what is coming on the next page. I was particularly impressed by Alexas when we read My Mother’s Secret Life by Rebecca Emberley. In the story a girl takes a nap and dreams her mother is in the circus but when she wakes up her mother is actually just her mother. Alexas’s love for illustrations led her to realize that in the girl’s dream her mother was wearing a sparkly outfit with sparkling nails and when she woke up her mother’s nail polish was the same as in the dream.
Alexas is very much in charge of how our meetings go. If I pick out a book that does not appeal to her she will simply put it back. She is very particular about what books she likes to read. She likes books with only a few words on each page. That way, after I have read it to her once she can reiterate it back to me. She is always pleased with herself after she reads a book to me and often will read the book a few times over again. One book she particularly likes is a book called Pickle Things by Marc Brown. She wants to read it every session. As soon as we have finished decorating our name tags she goes straight to the shelf that Pickle Things is on to read it again. This past session we could not find it and looked on the computer and found that somebody had checked it out of the library. So, we used its absence as a chance to start writing our own story.
Alexas decided she wanted our book to be about a mermaid. Her ideas were a bit jumbled so I asked her several questions to get the story more on track. In the process she dropped the mermaid idea, which complicated a part of the story that had to do with whales, but in the end the story came out quite nicely and she even started thinking of pictures she could draw for each page. Admittedly, there were a few instances that I had to fight laughter because her ideas did not necessarily flow together. Still, it was fun for both of us to play with her imagination and create something unique.
Alexas has showed me how empowering reading can be. Reading teaches you things. For example, How to Build Hair-Raising Haunted Houses by Megan Peterson taught us how to decorate our houses in spooky ways for Halloween. Alexas enjoyed the ideas in it so much she checked it out of the library so she could test out the designs on her own house. Since the first session, Alexas has developed much more of a taste for books. She knows which books she likes and she knows how to find them. On the first day, I told her we would be writing a book and she looked puzzled. I told her to start thinking about things to write about and she had a rather blank look on her face as though nothing came to mind. Last session, when I asked her again what she might like the write about, she immediately lit up with all the possibilities then finally decided on one she liked. We were able to write a story that we are both proud of and one that, hopefully, everybody will enjoy hearing on our last session when Alexas will read it aloud.
