National Literacy Week, day 2

January 22, 2008 by Barbara.

As I wrote Tuesday, National Literacy Week is underway. We didn’t do the puppet activity tonight as Reid was too interested in continuing to read scrapbook stories about herself. She is also asking for stories about when she was a baby (in my tummy and tiny on the outside), a little girl and a big girl. The latter category can include what she did the current day.

 A friend shared a link to an article listing 100 books every child should read. The list was produced in Great Britain but is sure to have books that you’re familiar with and others that you can look for. It is divided into the following categories:

* ‘If children are to become readers for life, they must first love
* 100 books every child should read - Part 1: Early years
* 100 books every child should read - Part 2: Middle years
* 100 books every child should read - Part 3: Early teens

The essay about instilling a love of reading is especially well-written. The writer talks of a boy listening to his mother read: He could hear it in her voice, in her laugh, in the tears in her eyes. He loved the fun, shared the sadness. He loved the music in the words. He never wanted storytime to end.

Then “unwillingly to school” he went, trudging the leafy pavements through pea-souper London smogs. From then on the stories were not magical, and they weren’t musical either. Words were to be properly spelled, properly punctuated, with neat handwriting. They were not story words any more, but nouns and pronouns and verbs. Later they were used for dictation and comprehension, and all was tested and marked. A multitude of red crosses and slashes covered his exercise books, like bloody cuts.

I dropped English as a major in university because of the way that books I enjoyed on the first read were detested by the time we were done covering them in class. I’ll have to remember this lesson as I read to Reid.

 What books would you put on your list of the 100 books all children should read?

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