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Australia’s National Reading Hour is fast approaching: 6 pm on Tuesday August 19: a time when we celebrate the act of reading with children. Reading is one of the most important things in my life. Stories take us into new worlds and teach us something more about ourselves, all at the same time.
But reading to a child is an even greater gift than this. Sharing the story enhances the enjoyment; undoubtedly it deepens the child’s understanding of a more difficult text – and most importantly, it’s an expression of caring. Most of us lucky enough to have grown up with bedtime stories remember them as a time of warmth, safety and love; most of us who read bedtime stories to our children will remember them in the same way. What better way to lay down the association between pleasure and learning; to give your child a resource for difficult times?
As an author who grew up with those feelings for bedtime stories, and attempted to pass them on in the same way to my children, it’s very special to me to hear of my own books being part of this interaction.
So if you would like to celebrate the National Reading Hour by having me read a pre-bedtime story to your child or children, over Skype or phone if you don’t live next door, just comment on this blog, email or tweet. Tell me why you’d like it, or what reading means to you, because that’s fun for me to hear, though I’ll choose the winner by random drawing, because it would be just too hard to choose the best reason for sharing a story!
Here’s what some author friends and I said about reading a couple of years ago:
Australia’s official Reading Hour is over for another year, but I hope that the practice of reading to your child will continue throughout homes across the country, and the world, every day.
I loved reading with a great bunch of kids at Mornington Library. They were insatiable and I soon worked through the stack of picture books I'd picked up after reading The Princess and her Panther. By then we'd collected some older kids too, so I read the first 5 chapters of
Ark in the Park.I think they would have happily gone listening on for another hour if the librarian hadn’t thought my voice needed rescuing!
Since then I’ve been enjoying this wonderful hamper of treats – but the real treat was an email I received a couple of days after the event. It truly encapsulates what the Reading Hour, and the whole Love2Read campaign, is all about. Because the best thing is that once a kid finds a book that hooks them into reading, they’re hooked for life.
So here’s part of what a mother wrote to me:
I thought you might like to know too that my seven year old also really enjoyed Ark in the Park. He has found learning to read a fairly major challenge in his life, but he's a determined small boy, and you inadvertently left him with a big challenge when you only read part of the book!
We borrowed the book from the library with me expecting to read the rest to him but he's decided to read it himself instead! He's only reading at about level 10 (a sentence or two to a page) at school but he's been reading Ark in the Park by stopping and spelling out each word he doesn't know (quite a lot of them!) and asking constantly 'what does this say'? as he goes along. Amazingly he's up to chapter 8, and still ploughing through it, one word at a time. He's obviously pretty determined to find out what happens in between where you left off and the last line that you read!
As they say - it often takes a village to raise a child - just thought it might be nice for you to know how your story has made a difference to one small boy!
What a wonderful feeling that must be! Congratulations. There's so much bad news about reading rates and parents not reading to their children at night it's great to see some positive news. I'm glad that mother sent you the email.
Thanks. And I'm very glad she emailed too - such a wondeful thing to hear!