"My Reading Family" - Free stories online. Create books for kids

To my beautiful daughter, Charlotte. Fierce, smart and full of joy- you are a super reader and a super girl!

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My name is Charlotte. I’m a kid who loves to read. And I am lucky, because I come from a reading kind of family.

And a reading kind of family means I get to read all the time. Everyone in my family loves books, maybe even as much as me. But I doubt it.

My Gaga Leah was a reading kid and now she’s a reading grandma. She has the biggest collection of books you have ever seen! She has so many books, she has to store them in little libraries all over her big wooden house. She has books in the bedrooms. Books in the living room. She even has hundreds of books stored in her attic! I’m not allowed up there yet, but someday I’m going to read every book she has up in that attic. That’s a promise.

When we go for visits at Gaga Leah’s house, there is always someone who will read to me. With so many people in my reading family, there are a lot of different reading laps to choose from. Sometimes, at a family party, I can go from one lap to another for an hour and not run out of laps! Gaga Margery, Uncle John, Pop Pop, Beth, Grandpa Jack - everyone will read to me if I ask them to. Soft laps, bony laps, laps with a giant belly or a soft bosom or hairy chest, all those laps are ready for me and my books!

Even if it’s not a lap day, I don’t have to worry. Behind the big yellow chair in the living room, there are two secret shelves bursting with books, colorful books of every size that I can reach all on my own. I read a book, pull it down, read another and pull it down, again and again, until all of those books fan around me, like the petals of a paper flower. And I don’t just look at the pictures either. I actually know how to really and truly read. All by myself.

Everyone was pretty surprised the day they figured out I could really read words in books. That’s because I taught myself when I was only three years old. But mostly they were surprised because I didn’t hear words when I was a baby and most kids who can’t hear have a hard time learning to read. I wear hearing aids now, but when I was a baby, I couldn’t hear much. Unless it was a noisy sound like a yell or a bell or a clap of thunder, I just couldn’t hear it. Especially words.

But I was lucky because I have reading parents. So I found the words anyway. My parents read to my twin brother, Henry, and me every day, all day long, even when we were the smallest of babies. I couldn’t hear the book words but I looked at the pictures and letter shapes and moving lips until my brain put it all together and it came out reading.

Now that I have hearing aids, I don’t have to look at pictures or words to know a story. Every night, when we are all tooth-brushed and pajama-ed, my dad reads chapter books. Mommy lies still on the bright orange carpet. Henry and I lay on our twin beds, side-by-side. And Daddy reads the book. And each of us paints the picture of the story in our head.

Each night it’s as if it all jumps out of the book and into my real life. The people and animals climb out of the book and hover around our room for a chapter or two, spinning over our heads while we lie in the half-dark, staring at our ceiling, listening to his voice. Then, when the book closes, they disappear again, tucked back in until we are ready to visit again.

When you have lots of books in lots of houses, you find out pretty quick that some stories are so good that everyone wants to write that story, each person in their own way. Like the story, The Three Little Pigs. Gaga Leah must have ten different kinds of Three Little Pigs books in her house! And I love every kind she has. This year, my class loved the story so much that we even acted out the story on a real stage with costumes and stick houses and everything. And guess who was the big, bad wolf? I huffed and puffed my way through my entire Spring. Nothing could escape me. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t knock down with my wolf breath. My family says I might have been the best wolf that ever was, and I believe them.

My family is a reading family and I’m a reading kid. So I bet I’ll be a reading grown-up, just like my parents and my Pop Pop and my Uncle John and everyone. Maybe I’ll grow up and I’ll have a bookstore. Maybe I’ll have my own big house and my own book library. I don’t really know cause I’m just at the beginning part and you can’t know what is going to happen until it does. My mom says that life is kind of like writing your own special book. It’s really up to you to decide how your story goes. You just have to get out there and write it.

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