The Hugeness of Reading Good Books
Three-year-old George came in crying to the church nursery, so I started reading Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon. He glanced at the book through his tears, and then I said, “George, can you help me find the mouse? I can’t find him.” The tears stopped and he looked intently at the page, trying hard to find the small mouse. A little boy on my lap found it first, and George smiled in delight. George forgot all about missing his dad and instead searched for the little mouse who moves all around the room on each page.
Reading good picture books to children is one of my loves. I can hardly contain my joy when I see a child’s eyes light up in response to a good story. But what is a good story? We live in a time and place where we have access to mountains of picture books –how do we know which stories are good? How do we stay away from the “twaddle,” as Charlotte Mason, a revered British educator, called it?
I owe much of my education about good children’s literature to the late Gladys Hunt whose Honey for a Child’s Heart dazzled me in my early child-rearing days with amazing book lists and a solid philosophy of children’s literature from a Christian perspective. She said this about good children’s books:
“Good books have a life force that propels children forward.”
“Books release something creative in the minds of those who absorb them.”
“A good book is imaginative and leaves something rich behind in the reader’s mind” (42).
Honestly, one of the reasons I started Selah Academy is to share with children my love of great children’s books. I am looking forward to spending quality time reading good picture books to our four to six-year-olds every day.
I can’t wait for the first day of school when we will get to know a boy named Lentil, Robert McCloskey’s beautifully sketched story of a boy who wishes he could whistle, but because he can’t, learns to play the harmonica and ends up saving his town. With delight we will introduce Selah kids to Masako Matsuno’s A Pair of Red Clogs, Marjorie Flack’s The Story about Ping, and Cynthia Rylant’s When the Relatives Came with its amazing watercolor illustrations.
But it’s not just the line up of wonderful books we have planned for Selah kids that makes me excited to read to them, it’s also the social-emotional connection kids develop with each other, the reader, and with the actual story through sharing it together. Meghan Cox Gurdon talks extensively in her amazing book, The Enchanted Hour, about how reading together gives us the human connection that we all long for, that we were created for. “The act of reading together,” she says, “secures people to one another, creating order and connection, as if we were quilt squares tacked together with threads made of stories” (47).
When George stopped crying to try to find the mouse in Goodnight Moon, it was more than a distraction. It was a relational moment. He connected to the rhythm and rhyme of Margaret Wise Brown’s words, he related to the funky pictures that are universally loved by children, and he made a connection with me and the other child sitting in my lap.
Reading together, Gurdon says, is not a small thing but rather “a place of unplugged, authentic human connection.”
Paula Cook, Director and Founder of Selah Academy