Home Run Reading: Baseball and books for kids
A whiff of roasted peanuts and hot-buttered popcorn, a sunlight drenched field, the crack of a bat, and a roaring crowd. There's nothing kids like better than a trip to the ball park.
The best way to connect kids to reading is to build on their passions and interests. If you have kids who love baseball--or as I do, have kids who like to go to the ballpark to eat hot dogs, ogle the players, eat fried dough, start the wave, eat hot pretzels, cheer, and eat some more--use that interest to get them reading.
Use baseball to lure your kids into reading the newspaper. Scan the headlines on the front page of the sports section to find a baseball article you will both enjoy reading. Point out the articles featuring baseball and help them start a newspaper photo and clipping file on their favorite teams and players. Show them the baseball statistics page. If they do not know already, show them how to track their favorite team's standing in the American and National Leagues, and explain the abbreviations in the Box Scores column.
Don't forget to show them your community paper, too. Small local papers will have articles on the high school's baseball and softball teams. Some of them even cover pre-high school community sports games and events. Almost every newspaper now has a Web site, so you can surf the Web together for more sports stories.
The next best thing to playing or watching baseball is to read a great baseball story. How can you make it fun?
- Pick a great book.
- Pick a cozy and/or fun place to read. The glider on the front porch, a blanket under a shade tree, or cool sheets on top of the bed; these are all acceptable locations.
- Be willing to make a fool out of yourself when you read. Make faces. Use different voices. Kids love it when their parents act silly. It allows them to feel superior; a momentary delusion, of course.
- Have your kids provide vocal sound effects for the background atmosphere: cheering, booing, munching, cracks of bats, whirring ball noises, etc.
- Provide lots of hot buttered popcorn, and if you happen to have some fried dough in the house, all the better!
Great baseball books to read with kids
Ask your local librarian to help you find these terrific baseball books and to suggest other books which may interest you and your family.
For the whole family: the most famous baseball story/poem of all time
- Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 (Caldecott Honor Book, 2001)
by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, illustrated by Christopher Bing.
- Casey at Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888 by Ernest Thayer, illustrated by C.F. Payne.
Picture books for kids, ages 4 - 9
- Baseball Saved Us, by Ken Mochizuki, illustrated by Dom Lee.
- Dirt on Their Skirts: The Story of the Young Women Who Won the World Championship, by Doreen Rappaport and Lyndall Callan, illustrated by Earl B. Lewis.
- Home Run: The Story of Babe Ruth, by Mike Wimmer, illustrated by Robert Burleigh.
- Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man, by David A. Adler, illustrated by Terry Widener.
- Players in Pigtails, by Shana Corey, illustrated by Rebecca Gibbon.
- Teammates, by Peter Golenbock, illustrated by Paul Bacon.
- Zachary's Ball, written and illustrated by Matt Tavares.
Books for kids, ages 9 - 12
- A Pitch in Time, by Robert A. Lytle.
- Satchel Paige, by Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by James Ransome.
- Some Kind of Pride, by Maria Testa.
- A Strong Right Arm: The Story of Mamie "Peanut" Johnson, by Michelle Y. Green, with an introduction by Mamie Johnson.
- Summerland, by Michael Chabon.
- In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, by Bette Bao Lord.
Books for kids, ages 12 - 18
- Baseball in April and Other Stories, by Gary Soto.
- Farm Team, by Will Weaver.
- Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, by Scott Simon.
- The New Yorker Book of Baseball Cartoons, edited by Robert Mankoff and Michael Crawford.
- Painting the Black, by Carl Deuker.
© 2003 Mary Brigid Barrett
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