Children do not become readers because we tell them to read, but because we immerse them inside of our own reading lives and invite them to create their own. These immersions charge us, as teachers and readers, to tell the story of our roads to reading, detail our daily traditions with books, and create opportunities for our students to engage with words inside and out of the walls of school. Below is the story I will tell my students, all boys, on opening day.

Boys …

As a young girl I struggled to learn to read, and we didn’t talk books in our house. I managed to make it to a doctorate program before I fell in love with words. Before the fall, I found meaning primarily in the pictures I painted of my world, and inside that stillness, I extrapolated a sense of peace within a chaotic childhood. Art…