Today was "Read for the Record 2008." This is a program sponsored by Jumpstart promoting literacy and reading to children. The goal is to have as many people as possible read the same book to children across the nation on the same day. This year the book was "Corduroy." I signed my class up to participate. Then I was off to check if we had the book in our preschool collection. (Thanks to my handy-dandy spreadsheet that I made this summer of all of the preschool's books, it was a snap. See, spreadsheets pay!) Sure enough, we had "Corduroy." I dug it out of the hundreds of books in our preschool reading area and set it on the pile to read this week.
I decided to go ahead and read it yesterday as a teaser to the read-a-thon today. I did my best to make the preschoolers excited about reading the same book as thousands of other kids in our country. Then I opened the book and stared in disbelief as the edition we had was in Spanish! I explained the problem to the kids and while many said they could count in Spanish, thanks to Dora, they agreed that they wouldn't be able to understand the entire story in Spanish. Nor would they be able to sit for an entire story that they didn't understand one single word. Nor would their teacher's 10 year old rusty Spanish be able to do it justice.
There was no backing off of the read-a-thon at this point as I had already published it in our class' weekly newsletter. So, it was off to the book store for me. Good thing I decided to introduce the idea yesterday so that I could save face and still join in the read-a-thon today.
And so, today we joined with thousands of children across the nation and read "Corduroy"--in English.
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