Waxing Poetic About Free Reading Time

Wallowing in nostalgia and reflecting on the importance of our mandatory choice

By: Sanjali Roy

A group of twenty-some elementary-age kids in various states of disarray are set loose in the school library and told to choose… whatever they want! Then, they traipse back into the classroom, choose a nook to sit in, and curl up with a book: this is the start of the sacred ritual of free reading time. The key word in both of these sentences is “choose”; one of the great qualities of this ritual is that it was one of our only tastes of autonomy. It gave us the power to decide how we wanted to stimulate our brain, unlike in other parts of elementary school, when that was chosen for us.

Free reading time was very important for a nerdy kid like me; it sparked my imagination and took me anywhere I wanted to go. The range of choices was enormous; my school’s library was a palace to be explored. Everything from “Harry Potter” (of course), “Percy Jackson,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” “Dork Diaries,” “Guardians of the Ga’hoole,” “Geronimo Stilton” and many other such stories populated the bookshelves. 

I myself was a “Warrior Cats” fan. Those books did have meaning, and they were not just for the weird kids (although I am proudly a self-proclaimed weird kid). They had very adult themes—no, not like that—in the sense that they introduced me to concepts such as power, politics, and the importance of one’s relationships through a lens I could understand: talking cats. And therein, I believe, lies the true value of free reading time—it was learning about how the world works in the safest and most intellectually stimulating way possible, in a way that multiplication, smartboards, and worksheets never could.