My county likes kids to read classics. My students, as a rule, don’t take kindly to this policy. The modern vocabulary is no match for the rich, nuanced language they encounter. They balk and read Spark Notes – if they read at all. I get frustrated with the ensuing alliteracy. Sigh.
As an experiment, I visited the Gutenberg Project and downloaded The Swiss Family Robinson onto my Kindle to read to my fifth grader. I was curious to see how he would take to it, and whether or not he'd be flummoxed by the 1812 vocabulary. Turns out he loves it.
The boys in the story tote all kinds of weaponry around the island so they’ll be ready to battle marauding jackals and the like. My son pictures himself with a fully loaded weapon belt ready to take on the best of them. Although we started out with me reading the book aloud to him, he picked it up one night when I was unavailable and read quite a bit on his own despite the cumbersome vocabulary.
Maybe I have a little literati on my hands – or maybe just a weapons maniac. It’s hard to say.
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