About a year ago, I decided the younger child was just old enough, and the older child still young enough, that I would read some classic children’s books to them both. It’s settled into a reasonably relaxing pre-bedtime ritual. Once the younger is ready in pyjamas, the three of us gather in her room. The kids often sketch or doodle as I read, and I don’t mind as long as they’re quietly engaged and have most of their attention available for the story.
What made me start? Partly I wanted to introduce them to characters that I loved. I usually just read the first in a series, as I’m hoping they’ll eventually want to read more for themselves. It’s exciting to introduce them to worlds that were such a big part of my own childhood, so I’m sharing something of myself and my own inner life as I’m giving them an opening to respond to these stories and the language in their own way. Some of the books are just really good stories. And sometimes it’s about opening up a world of cultural references and knowledge to them. My daughter’s teacher had read a couple – Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I think, and then C.S.Lewis’ the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – to her class, and I liked the idea.
I also like to read to the two kids together. They each have a book they’re reading alone too, but I like the process of choosing together what we’ll read, and for them to meet these characters together. I hope I’m giving them a set of shared references and understandings. The children react as we read, commenting on a character’s behaviour and we’ll discuss them, which characters we like, who we think is being unreasonable, how do they feel, why might they act that way. I hope too that it feeds into their collective imagination, adding areas of overlap as they each form their own sense of literature and the world. Many classic children’s books feature groups of siblings, and the dynamics between them is always a subject of great interest!
There is usually a temporal and cultural gulf. When I start a book, I read out to them the date of first publication, and try to relate it for them. ‘Nanna would have been little when this was written’, or ‘this was written between the World Wars’, and so we have to discuss when the Wars were, and sometimes what they were about, or I try to fill in a little about the Great Depression or something else that would colour the world the story is set in. It challenges me, but we’re starting to be able to make connections between books, and I hope we’re building a sense of societies changing over time.
The kids judge the attitudes of earlier eras with their own attitudes and expectations, of course. And there’s lots of new vocabulary and things to talk about. I do edit slightly as I read. Sometimes because a word has changed its meaning, so I give an alternative that conveys the original intention. Sometimes because a book uses a word that has become (or always was!) a slur, and I don’t want to accustom the kids to its use. Sometimes there’s no way around it, and I have to read, and then have the conversation about the word, or storyline, or context. It can be disconcerting for me, when it’s a book I knew as a child but haven’t read in thirty or more years and suddenly there’s a passage or storyline that I recognise as I read, but had forgotten was there. Some of those surprise me, or shock me with their assumptions. I try to choose books that I think will still have meaning today, but the casual prejudices of the past have to be confronted and the assumptions of some characters, or authors, have to be challenged. And the more we read together, the more reference points we have for conversation and consideration of what can be difficult topics. I do find myself needing to pause, think how to explain, how to phrase something, how to make it relatable – needing too to dig deep for the honesty that I owe them for the trust that they put in me.
More on individual books and authors and how we got on with them in future posts!
P.S. What I’m reading. I have just finished the Wolf Age and am savouring that moment when you’ve finished one book and have yet to decide on the next, when everything is possible, and the TBRs wave to me, and I’m waiting for that moment of magical, temporal connection between me and the book that is right for me right now.
Books for Our Children 