Mem Fox, Beloved
Children's Author
Parents of newborns and toddlers
should get to know Australian children's author Mem Fox, and spend some time on
her website, www.memfox.com
Although she's famous for her 35 or
so books, including Possum Magic and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, her
real passion is helping parents and teachers with installing and inspiring
literacy in young children.
She has some of the most
common-sense, positive, encouraging content you can imagine to help parents
bring their young children to early literacy - early reading - so that they can
be off to the races in school as well as life.
One of her main suggestions is that
parents are really skimping on the amount of time they spend reading to their
children. One 5-minute short book at bedtime, even if you keep up that habit
every night, is just not enough.
This beloved author is recommending
more like a half-hour or an hour a day. If that's too much for bedtime, you can
always break it up into two or three reading sessions per day, or keep things totally
spontaneous. But a rule of thumb of 30 to 60 minutes a day with the child's
eyeballs fixed on a book is probably the wisest course of action. How many
parents live up to that? Very few! And it shows, with declining literacy rates
in the early grades in school, burdening primary-level teachers more than we
ever used to.
Consider this excerpt from her
website's section, "If I Were Queen of the World":
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"It seems
to me that those of us who are parents and carers can and should be encouraged
to play a key role in the development of literacy. After all, we have the great
advantage of having fewer childen in our families than teachers have in their
classes and are therefore able to have valuable one-to-one fun with our
offspring, through the medium of books. Having fun with books, which means
absolutely loving books and all they have to offer, is an essential
pre-requisite to learning to read.
"So please,
I beg you all to read superb books aloud to your children! Begin on the day
they are born. I am very serious about this: at least three stories and five
nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only at bedtime, either. Read with
passion and expressive abandon, maintaining the same variety in your voice at
exactly the same place in the story or rhyme every time, keeping the same louds
and softs, the same highs and lows, the same fasts and slows. In this manner
your children will begin to remember the words by remembering the 'tune' of
your reading. Memorising a rhyme or story and turning the pages at the right
time is an important step in learning to read and should never be discounted as
cheating. Fill their minds with a torrent of wonderful words, familiar and
unfamiliar, common and grand, basic and lofty. And always make it a wild and
joyful experience.
"If a
borrowed story book or nursery-rhyme book becomes favourite, do your utmost to
purchase it for your child. Children who have lived in book-filled homes prior
to going to school are known to be scholastically advantaged for the rest of
their lives. And children who have memorised eight nursery rhymes by the age of
three, so I have been told, are always the best readers by the age of eight.
"As
children become more and more familiar with a book, play games which focus on
individual words and letters, such as covering repetitive or rhyming words with
your fingers and letting the child guess which word might be underneath. Make
it harder and harder—but keep 'fun' uppermost in your mind—by asking what
letter the hidden word might start with. Or you might choose common words like
and or the and find them on every page yourself, pointing them out to the child
with squeals of excitement at each new discovery; then let the child find them,
as a game, always as 'fun'. Write the words on a piece of paper in a sentence
that has meaning to the child: e.g 'Chloë loves the beach and Nana,' and stick
it on the fridge.
"Provide a
variety of writing materials: different thicknesses of pen and crayon and
pencil, scraps of computer paper, tiny notebooks, real exercise books, and
coloured paper and leave them lying around so that children can draw, or
draw/write, or pretend to write, or really write anything from notices for
their bedroom doors, to shopping lists, letters to grandparents, complaints to
parents, requests to Santa, and so on. It is tremendously important for the
recognition of letters, and the relationship of those letters to sounds, that
children should grapple with their own print as early as possible. Reading and
writing go hand in hand: each depends upon, and improves the other, in a cycle
of development."
