Good fences make good readers

“Here,” I said, grabbing the tallest book I could find from her overcrowded bookshelf. “Let’s use this to mark a boundary.” I put the book all the way to the left of the upper shelf. Kara and L. looked on. “Every time you read a book, it goes to the left of this tall, white one. Pretty soon, this marker-book will start moving until it makes it all the way to the other side!” My fingers flipped across the paperback spines, demonstrating how it would move.

That’s how it got started two nights ago. But who could imagine it would be so compelling a visual-aid. Last night the only thing that stopped her reading was that she could no longer hold her head up from drowsiness. And, before we turned off the light, she’d burned through two books. “You should have seen her face last night putting that second book on the shelf,” L. said to me this morning. “She was beaming!”