The Tiger’s Bookshelf: Reading Magic
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
“…I believe reading aloud cures pretty well everything from warts to global warming,” says Mem Fox in her splendid book Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever, now in a revised and updated edition.
After reading her essays about the true magic that comes from reading aloud, I don’t think this lady is exaggerating. If reading aloud to children can turn them into smart, inquisitive, creative people, then reading aloud may well hold the key to solving all of the world’s woes. What it is certain to do, according to Mem, is make children early, enthusiastic readers who will be passionate about books for their entire lives.
She backs this assertion up with some amazing stories. Her own daughter began reading fluently at four years of age, after two weeks at school. Her hairdresser’s child took great pleasure in reading aloud “with great expression and verve” when she was “barely six”, and her next-door neighbor Josephine was a happy and adventurous reader by the time she was three.
These children had two things in common–their parents had no idea where or how this reading miracle had occurred, and their lives had been filled with books read aloud to them by their parents, regularly and joyfully, as often as possible.
Reading aloud to a child, Mem explains, can take place in only fifteen minutes a day–as long as those fifteen minutes are interesting, intimate, and interactive. It’s an activity as simple as sitting and snuggling with a picture book, and being drawn into a story as much as the child being read to is. Talking about the book, wondering about its characters, letting the child see the words as the story unfolds–these, she says, are all keys to the act of reading, but the primary key is simply reading aloud.
She tells a wonderful anecdote about Einstein being asked by a mother how she could make her child intelligent, to which that great man responded by telling her to read her child fairy stories. The woman, thinking he was joking, laughed and asked what she should do after that. “Read him more fairy stories,” Einstein told her.
Reading to your children, Mem says, is an ongoing joy–from birth into their teens, parents and children can find common ground and common pleasure in reading aloud. Her lighthearted, chatty, intelligent essays in this book point the way–and her wonderful books for children (along with a list that she provides of twenty other books that children love, which includes Marjorie’s recommendation, Hairy MacLary from Donaldson’s Dairy) give parents splendid choices for beginning the adventure of reading to their children from the minute that they first meet.
