Reading to children stimulates their imagination and sense of humour. That’s part of the fun of regularly sharing good stories. So pull up a chair and get ready for a good book.

Your Reading Chair may be a bed for a bedtime story, a carpet during an afternoon visit, or a rocking chair. Don’t limit the listeners. You can invite a crowd to snuggle on a sofa. My husband often enjoyed the tales I read to our son.

Many children love some foods and are repelled by others. Do you know a child who has strong food likes and dislikes? They might enjoy The Boy Who Loved Bananas authored by George Elliott and illustrated by Andrej Krystoforski (Toronto: Kids Can Press, 2005).

Matt has a passion for bananas. After watching the monkeys at feeding time during a visit to the zoo, he refuses to eat anything else. Matt has bananas for breakfast, bananas for lunch, and bananas for dinner. What’s his favourite snack? You guessed it: bananas.

Have fun discussing various banana concoctions: banana bread, muffins, chips, pie, splits, milkshakes, pudding, soufflé, tarts, and casseroles. Discuss what other banana dishes Matt might like.

Imitate the parents’ voices as Matt’s mother and father try to convince him to eat something else. Laugh when Matt has to face the surprising consequences of so many bananas. Try to maintain different voices for all the people who see what happens. Enjoy the remedies Matt’s parents try—and what makes Matt finally choose a different food.

Another amusing food book is The Enormous Potato, retold by Aubrey Davis and illustrated by Dušan Petričič (Kids Can Press, 1997). In this story, a farmer plants a potato that grows bigger and bigger and bigger.

Potatoes grow underground. When it comes time to pull up this potato, the farmer can’t do it by himself. He calls for his wife. Wife! Yoo-hoo! Wife! Use a different voice for this.

The farmer and the wife can’t pull up the potato, so they call for their daughter. Daughter! Oh, Daughter!

When each new character arrives, the text repeats itself.

The daughter grabbed the wife.

The wife grabbed the farmer.

The farmer grabbed the potato.

They pulled and pulled again.

But the potato wouldn’t come out of the ground.

After the third repeat, older listeners will enjoy participating in this chant. Challenge them to predict whose help is called for next. Laugh at the scene when the potato finally comes up.

The next pages show pictures of the entire town cooking and eating the potato. Discuss the different ways it’s cooked, and how people share the work.

• Who’s cutting?

• Who’s peeling?

• Who’s cooking?

• What kind of help does each have?

What utensils are used to eat the potato? Take time to enjoy this visual, as well as the one showing the farmer and his family after the potato is all eaten. What shows how much they enjoyed it?

Reading this story makes me hungry for a baked potato with butter oozing through the cracks and topped with sour cream. Ask your readers how they enjoy potatoes. As a followup, you might want to cook and enjoy some.

For additional information on helping kids learn to read, see http://soundsforfun.ca/getting-ready-to-read/. Sounds for Fun has an app to help young children develop phonics skills. You can download it at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/sounds-for-fun-s-b-m-t-h-c/id689313346

Helen Mason for Sounds for Fun

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.