In my ongoing quest to get my rising fourth-grader to read more, I downloaded A Wrinkle in Time onto my iPad (which he’s otherwise not allowed to touch). He read a few chapters, lost his place a few times, changed the type color, changed it back, and then got caught up in a paperback copy of Holes that his school sent home for summer reading. When he finished it and declared it his favorite book ever, I asked him if he wanted to go back to A Wrinkle in Time.
“Yes,” he said, hesitantly, “but it would be easier if it was a real book.”
In France, kids and young teens seem to share my kid’s appreciation for actual type on paper. The New York Times reports that Mon Quotidien, a daily paper designed for 10- to 14-year-olds, was such a success in its first few years of publishing that it spawned both Petit Quotidien (for 7- to 10-year-olds) and L’Actu (for 14- to 17-year-olds). It’s a paid subscription-only paper, published every day but Sunday, and while more than 165,000 families subscribe, the parents who foot the bill are increasingly non-newspaper-readers themselves.
Read the rest on Slate’s XX Factor.
And don’t you wish we had a paper like this? Somehow Highlights and the Youth Hockey mag just aren’t cutting it.
Were I to travel a lot, I’d invest in a kindle but since I don’,I can’t imagine giving up the feeling of holding a book in my hand. Both of my kids love books. My son didn’t like to read until 2nd grade when I told him he could either stay up 1/2 hour late reading or go to bed at his regular time. Now he reads more frequently. He would love a newspaper geared toward young teens. I get my news on the computer and rarely read a newspaper although I read a ton of books.