Last year, I capped my week-long Freedom to Read Week series with a post where I mentioned that Pace had written his name for the first time ever. That led me to ruminate on what a major milestone this is and how illiteracy is another “big picture” form of censorship beyond the “banned books”-type issues that we usually think about during FTRW.
(To summarize, this week, I’ve talked about a variety of things that are de facto forms of censorship – limiting democracy, e-books, political correctness, illiteracy.)
Quite unintentionally, this week’s FTRW series is going to end on a similar note to last year.
I was home with Pace yesterday and he was playing with a stapler (er, that doesn’t sound good!) He realised that, if he stapled a couple pages together, it looked like a book. That inspired us to try to make a real book. I asked him to tell me a story and what you see written below is pretty much exactly what came out of his mouth (I wish I could say he was responsible for the drawings as well but unfortunately, that’s all on me.)
Anyhow, it’s so gratifying to see the progression in one short year – from just writing his name to now telling fully developed stories with beginnings, middles and ends, protagonists and all that good English 30 type stuff.
Maybe by next year, the next milestone will be that he writes a book – that’s so bad that I renounce all my personal beliefs and have to trash it because it’s really vulgar and offensive! 😉
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