As the oldest children of two overachieving Gen Xers, Jamie and Tanner got a lot of attention from us for their academics. Annette and I were enthusiastic, hands-on parents in those early years. Maybe a little too intense. We loosened up a bit over time. Things were more relaxed for Allyn and Jason, and by the time the Littles came along, well ... they had it easy.
This story is about how we built a family culture of reading, starting with sight words and extending to scriptures, silly rhymes, and even salad dressing labels.
While this mostly focuses on Jamie and Tanner, all of our kids started reading fairly early. But Jamie and Tanner (or “JT,” as we called them when they were little) stand out in my memory because they were the first. Everything felt new with them. We were still trying to figure out our parenting style and were eager to do everything “right.”
“When you read, you begin with A, B, C…”
Wait, this is not a musical.
I still remember how proud we felt after Jamie’s three-year-old WIC checkup when the social worker praised her early development. She could already say the alphabet and count to ten. I do not have a similar memory for Tanner, but he was right there with her. By the time he was three, he could do the same.
My mom, a kindergarten teacher for thirty years, instilled a love of reading in me early on. Every gift I received as a child included at least one book, and she continued that tradition with Jamie and Tanner until she passed. It just felt natural to begin reading to JT as soon as they could sit up and look around.
When Jamie turned two, I subscribed to the Dr. Seuss Book Club because I wanted to collect the books from my own childhood. We eventually canceled the subscription, but not before building a solid library of Seuss classics.
With Jamie, I began teaching a few simple sight words like a, the, an, it, at, and and. Whenever I read to her, I would pause at those words and let her read them aloud. She loved the feeling of participating in the story.
We practiced most consistently during our family devotionals, reading the Book of Mormon together each night. Jamie got pretty good at spotting her sight words, and it became part of our rhythm. Eventually, she proudly read an entire sentence on her own. From then on, she became part of the reading rotation.
In time, each of the kids learned the same way, picking up sight words as they listened and watched. In a very real sense, all eight of our children learned to read from the pages of the Book of Mormon.
Reading became part of everyday life in our home. We read at bedtime, yes, but also in the car, on the couch, and, often, at the dinner table. When Annette or I read aloud at the dinner table, we would often pause to say, “You have to take another bite before we can turn the page.” That was usually enough motivation to get through the vegetables. Some of my favorite memories are of story nights, stretched out on the family room floor, passing a book from one reader to the next.
Over the years, we read everything from Dr. Seuss to Magic Tree House, from the Animorphs series to the Lorien Legacies. We worked our way through Little House on the Prairie, Old Yeller, and Savage Sam, the Wizard of Oz series, and, of course, Harry Potter, which became a family-wide rite of passage. Each child developed their own tastes, and we followed their curiosity wherever it led.
When we lived in Tallahassee, we discovered the Word Bird books at the public library. Jamie especially loved Word Bird Makes Words with Pig, which was full of simple rhymes that made reading feel like a game. After we moved to Norman, we made a point of finding the same books for Tanner. Our weekly trips to the library became one of our favorite routines, and our involvement in the summer reading programs was a tradition.
Another unexpected learning tool showed up at the dinner table. One night, I pointed to the ketchup bottle and asked Jamie if she could find the word “sugar.” She did. Then we talked about how much sugar was in ketchup and compared it to the amount in salad dressing. It became a little game. Jamie and Tanner would compete to find “fat,” “sugar,” or “calories” on whatever food packaging we had out. That playful curiosity turned into reading practice without any of us really noticing.
Even now, Addison still goes to the library weekly and checks out as many books as she can carry. Reading has always been more than a pastime in our home. It has been one of the threads tying us together.
Looking back, I am grateful that reading became such a steady presence in our family life. We did not always get everything right as parents, but we got that part right. We made reading feel like something normal, something fun, something meaningful.
The books we shared, the scriptures we read aloud, the ketchup labels we analyzed at dinner, they all shaped the way our kids saw the world. And for me, it was a reminder that some of the most lasting things we teach our children happen in the quiet, ordinary moments.
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