How to Help Your Child's Brain Grow

You can set the stage for excellent reading comprehension later on just by introducing your kids to a wide variety of literature and experiences. 

Reruns

I loved Little House on the Prairie as a child. However, I have a confession: I was in love with the TV Series, * not the books. 


My sister and I watched the reruns every day after school. 

It was always the same. Mom would be ironing in the laundry room, and we’d smuggle Twinkies in from the kitchen. We’d sit together on our tweedy brown and gold couch, riveted to the screen.

Our favorite episode was when Nellie pretended to need a wheelchair, then [spoiler alert] Laura pushed her down the hill into the pond, and Nellie stood up and walked out. 

After that, whenever the opening theme song played and showed that hill, my sister and I would race each other to say “there’s where Nellie fell down!”

Little House books

Even though I devoured books as a kid, I never read Little House On the Prairie. When I taught fifth grade I had the whole series on my classroom bookshelf, and nobody ever read those either.

On our most recent family road trip, I brought along a library audio book of On the Banks of Plum Creek (which I mistakenly thought was the first book in the series). Everybody loved it, including the two 5-year-olds!

I hadn’t been sure they’d be able to follow it, and we did need to stop and explain a few things, but overall they did fine. One of our favorite picture books had set the stage for them.

  

Nora’s Chicks

Like our audio book, Nora's Chicks by Patricia MacLachlan, takes place in horse-and-wagon days on the Great Plains. Unlike my favorite Little House episode, it is about friendship rather than rivalry.

The Story Begins

Nora, with her parents and baby brother, emigrates from Russia to a farm on the American prairie. Nora misses her familiar Russian landscape, and, most of all, she misses having friends nearby.

She appeals to her father, and he brings home ten chicks and two geese for Nora. He allows her to keep them as pets.

Our Favorite Parts

Nora names each chick, and there is a two-page spread showing each bird labeled with its name. Incidentally, my daughters love pointing at each chick and trying to read out its name.

My girls’ favorite part of the story, though, is when the chicks follow the family to church one Sunday, and the minister, standing before the congregation, says, “…welcome to Nora’s chicks.” For some reason this just cracks my kids up – preschool humor I guess.

Anyway, after Nora returns home, she discovers that a chick is missing. A girl on a neighboring farm brings it back to her, and Nora finally finds friendship.

Why I Love It

Except for the church-crashing chickens, Nora's Chicks isn't meant to be funny. Rather, it is gently serious and emotionally open. The writing is spare yet compelling. Illustrator Kathryn Brown’s watercolors have the golden cast of prairie grasslands and feature lovely details. 

This book is a welcome break from the modern world, and I have enjoyed each of the hundred times I've read it aloud.

Teacher Talk

Details in Nora’s Chicks give little kids a sense of what a prairie is, how people traveled before they had cars, and how rural families sustained themselves.

Laying A Foundation

It is the perfect introduction to a lifetime of reading other excellent books with similar settings, from MacLachlan’s own Newberry Medal-winning novel Sarah, Plain and Tall , to the Little House on the Prairie series, and on up to Willa Cather’s My Antonia in high school or college.

In teacher jargon, this type of background knowledge is called cognitive schema. Kids can more easily understand what they’re reading when they already have schema in place. 

Brain Wiring

The neurons in our brains actually grow new connections to each other when we're exposed to new things. That's why it's easier to understand a book on the second (or tenth!) reading - our brains have already run the wiring to process the information. 

Conversely, if you read a book that has a wildly unfamiliar setting, then your brain can be too busy attending to understanding the new setting to be able to pay attention to other elements of the story.

Nora's Chicks is a delightful way to introduce your little ones to a bit of American history.


* (All links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. This makes it convenient for you to see what I'm talking about. If you make a purchase, Amazon will pay me a small fee, which helps support this blog.)