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<blockquote data-quote="donna723" data-source="post: 309181" data-attributes="member: 1883"><p>Gonna jump in here too. I remember a while back going in to a large bookstore on a Saturday morning and finding it packed to the rafters with kids! You could hardly move in there for all the kids! I couldn't figure out what was going on until I heard someone mention that the latest Harry Potter book was coming out that day! And I thought to myself, "Hey, if Harry Potter can get that many kids that age away from their TV's, computers, video games and cell phones and actually sitting down reading a BOOK ... he's OK with me!" Give them enough credit at that age to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality - they're not as dumb as you think!</p><p> </p><p>When my son was in elementary school their school librarian was particularly inflexible and I went to war with her many times. She was so rigid on enforcing the 'rules' that she defeated the purpose. She had seperate shelves for each grade level and refused to let them check out any other books. My son is very intelligent and was reading on his own long before he started kindergarten, even a few (carefully selected) Stephen King short stories! In first and second grade the grade level books bored him silly and he refused to read them. He was sort of insulted and called them 'baby books'! I never really won that one, even after going to the principal. My solution was to take him to the public library who made a special exception for him and allowed him to have a card in his own name. And from then on he spent every Saturday morning having free reign of the public library, choosing books on astronomy or Ancient Egypt or whatever else interested him. He's turning 29 this in a few weeks and you still never see him without a book in his hands!</p><p> </p><p>It makes me so sad to see books being banned that were always considered to be great literature, the real classics. "Tom Sawyer"? "Huckleberry Finn?" Oh, please! A smart teacher could take either book and turn it into a valuable history lesson as well as a fun book to read. Mark Twain's books are a perfectly accurate depiction of how things really were in those days and they show how far we really have come. Slavery is part of our country's history, it really happened, and you can't deny it by preventing kids from reading about it. And I bought my kids their own copy of "Catcher in the Rye" and both read it and loved it. I hardly think they would have been corrupted for life by reading a few four-letter words that they heard every day on the school bus!</p><p> </p><p>There have been several attempted 'book bannings' here too, a few law suits filed. And they usually come from members of extremely conservative religious groups, and it's surprising to see what books they want banned and for what reasons - a bit like thinking that one of the Teletubbies was secreting promoting homosexuality because of the shape and color of his antenneas! Of course I wouldn't have wanted my kids reading outright trash either, but I firmly believe the decision of what books a child should be allowed to read belongs with the parents.</p><p> </p><p>Oh, and as a P.S. ... When my daughter and sister in law were furnishing my grandsons nursery before he was born, they bought a dresser with a big hutch with several shelves. Then they hit every book store and library sale they could find and filled up those shelves with every book a kid could ever want to read. He had all the classic kids books even before he was born, INCLUDING his very own copies of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="donna723, post: 309181, member: 1883"] Gonna jump in here too. I remember a while back going in to a large bookstore on a Saturday morning and finding it packed to the rafters with kids! You could hardly move in there for all the kids! I couldn't figure out what was going on until I heard someone mention that the latest Harry Potter book was coming out that day! And I thought to myself, "Hey, if Harry Potter can get that many kids that age away from their TV's, computers, video games and cell phones and actually sitting down reading a BOOK ... he's OK with me!" Give them enough credit at that age to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality - they're not as dumb as you think! When my son was in elementary school their school librarian was particularly inflexible and I went to war with her many times. She was so rigid on enforcing the 'rules' that she defeated the purpose. She had seperate shelves for each grade level and refused to let them check out any other books. My son is very intelligent and was reading on his own long before he started kindergarten, even a few (carefully selected) Stephen King short stories! In first and second grade the grade level books bored him silly and he refused to read them. He was sort of insulted and called them 'baby books'! I never really won that one, even after going to the principal. My solution was to take him to the public library who made a special exception for him and allowed him to have a card in his own name. And from then on he spent every Saturday morning having free reign of the public library, choosing books on astronomy or Ancient Egypt or whatever else interested him. He's turning 29 this in a few weeks and you still never see him without a book in his hands! It makes me so sad to see books being banned that were always considered to be great literature, the real classics. "Tom Sawyer"? "Huckleberry Finn?" Oh, please! A smart teacher could take either book and turn it into a valuable history lesson as well as a fun book to read. Mark Twain's books are a perfectly accurate depiction of how things really were in those days and they show how far we really have come. Slavery is part of our country's history, it really happened, and you can't deny it by preventing kids from reading about it. And I bought my kids their own copy of "Catcher in the Rye" and both read it and loved it. I hardly think they would have been corrupted for life by reading a few four-letter words that they heard every day on the school bus! There have been several attempted 'book bannings' here too, a few law suits filed. And they usually come from members of extremely conservative religious groups, and it's surprising to see what books they want banned and for what reasons - a bit like thinking that one of the Teletubbies was secreting promoting homosexuality because of the shape and color of his antenneas! Of course I wouldn't have wanted my kids reading outright trash either, but I firmly believe the decision of what books a child should be allowed to read belongs with the parents. Oh, and as a P.S. ... When my daughter and sister in law were furnishing my grandsons nursery before he was born, they bought a dresser with a big hutch with several shelves. Then they hit every book store and library sale they could find and filled up those shelves with every book a kid could ever want to read. He had all the classic kids books even before he was born, INCLUDING his very own copies of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn". [/QUOTE]
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