Just One More Chapter, Mum!

For the first time I’m joining in with the Works-for-me-Wednesday carnival hosted on Shannon’s RocksinmyDryer blog.

The carnival features blogging mums sharing their experience on family life; a great global Kaffee Klatsch, on the self-explanatory, ‘It works for me’ theme.

My first suggestion is: Try reading this blog aloud!

Books always have been and are still central to our family life. Of course we’ve spent hours reading to the girls virtually since they were born, but even now they’re getting older (going on 9 and 13), reading aloud is still hugely important joint activity.

I had to call a halt to a readings of a book each, catering for their different reading ages, when I realised that by reading both of them a bedtime chapter I was spending close to two hours a night ‘on stage’, and now we usually have just one book on the go.

Read-Aloud Ground Rules:

• Reading ahead by yourself is forbidden. I have resorted to hiding the book if we’ve stopped at a real cliff-hanger.
• No reading when one child is not around, without special dispensation and a promise to re-read the chapter/s later.

Choosing something that appeals to everyone can be a challenge. Harry Potter is a great family favourite. Yes, we really have worked our way out loud through all six volumes, some of them twice. I do a mean Prof,. McGonagall, if I say so myself, while my husband has Umbridge’s “ahem” to a T. We are all world-beaters on Harry Potter trivia, but it’s really our youngest who shines at these family quizzes. That’s another plus for sharing the books as a family, since the 4 year age difference could so easily have meant that Beka would be left out. Instead she’s the greatest HP aficionado of all.

When children are small you can usually keep up with what they’re reading and what they’re watching on TV. You get the references, the allusions, even sometimes the jokes. As they get older and their horizons expand, it is much harder to stay on top of what they’re learning about the world.

Reading aloud has allowed me to enjoy some of the great fiction for young people that’s around today and deal with some of the questions any good book must provoke. As Rhianna looks forward to hitting 13, sharing books we read aloud is providing us with a way of discussing challenging and emotional issues - drugs, divorce, sex, HIV, bullying, bitchiness, friendship, terrorism - coolly and objectively as we comment on the behaviour, choices and motives of the characters we love and those we love to hate.

Other reasons to read aloud include –

Top of the list: it's fun! & you get to sit down. If you're lucky you get to cuddle up too.

Encourages openness: with books on the agenda for family discussion, my daughters feel confident to talk about content they encounter in their own reading that upsets, disturbs or delights them.

Bribery: the promise of a chapter after school helps get through a bad day. Reading The Hobbit together took away some of the sting when I wouldn’t let them see the Lord of the Rings films at a time when most of their classmates seemed mired in orc blood and guts.

Listeners pay attention too: I am pulled up smartly if I muddle the voices or get a word wrong.

Extend your reading from known and loved categories. I don’t read ‘Sheltie the pony' type stories and Enid Blyton has long been banned, but choose instead from the more challenging end of the spectrum. Doesn’t spoil the fun, and we have found some great and enduring favourites.

Most of all though, we enjoy being together and sharing a story unfold. It’s gripping, it’s challenging, it can be exhausting doing all the voices.

But I don’t kid myself anymore that it’s a bedtime story. We have after school chapters, (today we managed a before the school bus 3 lines!), a waiting for the dentists chapter, an I had a terrible day chapter. Last but not least is the ‘let’s just read one more’ chapter.

Now Beka and Rhianna are great performers themselves, I’m particularly enjoying the “I’ll just read you a chapter, mum.” chapter. Yes, I know it’s putting off bedtime, but I just have to know what happens next!

Some of our best re-alouds:
The Menymns series.

Phillip Pullman. The His Dark Material Trilogy + the Sally Lockhart books are great too.

The Hobbit

Harry Potter – the whole lot.

A Christmas Carol – start on the 1^st of December. It’s now a ritual my children force me to find time for. Along with the Advent calendar, it's the start whistle for Christmas.

We've had so many great reads I’ll list titles in a separate post including family comments and star ratings. Look out for it in the next few days. Add your suggestions here too.

Read my recent post on the children's art and other 'let's find out more' activities prompted by our current read aloud, Carole Wilkinson’s The Dragonkeeper.

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