A Saturday Afternoon With Pirates

Today, my son (who's in 2nd grade) learned a valuable lesson... "save early, save often". He loves history and has been on a pirates kick for awhile now. He was even a pirate for Halloween. He's been reading and rereading the same book about pirates for months. Today he decided to make a book about pirates. He got on the iMac and started typing in an old version of Microsoft Word for the Mac. It is not a very good program, but it's pretty easy to use for a 2nd grader. He was almost done when all of a sudden, the program crashed. He didn't know what had happened. I asked him if he had saved his work, but he said "No." The tears started to well up in his eyes. My heart was breaking for him. He had worked so hard for hours on this book. He could've been playing on the Wii or watching TV, but instead he was reading up on pirates and making a book about it. I reopened the program to see if I could save it. The program had recovered the document, but wouldn't let me save or print it, and then it crashed again. I never could get that document to open again. Everything was lost. After an hour or so of moping, he finally agreed to let me help him retype the book on my laptop. First thing we did was SAVE it. We added pictures and cool fonts. It looked better than ever. Here's one page of his book. My little man was so happy. I spent over an hour with him helping him make his book. It was a great bonding experience and helped to foster his love of reading. It isn't too much to ask for all parents to just spend an hour or so a day with your child to foster that love of reading and writing. Imagine all of the readers we would have in our country if everyone did just that. So, please, read with your child. Spend time with your child. Help them foster that love of literacy.

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