Sixteen Years of Storytime (with Mini Grey)

  Long ago, before I had a child at all, I went to a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival by author/illustrator Ted Dewan. Ted said that, when you have a child, you finally see the very beginning of the story, the bit of the story of your life you can’t remember in your own life: those first months and years of being a baby.

 And so the time came (2006) when we had a new-born Herbie and amazingly the hospital let us take him home and try to look after him on our own.

In the first years of storytime we were becalmed in a world of pinky-ponks and ninky-nonks for quite a while, managing to climb out with Shoe Baby, That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown and Room on the Broom. Before Herbie could talk, we read him Shoe Baby, fervently hoping his first words would be “How do you do?” (It was “star.”) 

 

from Shoe Baby by Polly Dunbar and Joyce Dunbar

 

When Herbie got to be about 4 or 5 we tried mixing in the odd longer book; some Roald Dahl, some Winnie the Pooh (OK, I was desperate to read Herbie my own favourite childhood chapter books) -  and our reading landscape turned from the garden of picture books onto some longer paths. Picture books weren’t abandoned, and Herbie would grab a stack of them to commune with when he woke up. And he still has a shelf of picture books in his room at age 16. Ones that it became important to keep close.

HERBIE’S PICTURE BOOK SHELF

Reading a chapter book is a gift; every story time there’s the thrill of discovering what happens next, and the chance to carry on communing with characters that you know. Some of our very favourite early chapter books were the brilliantly illustrated ‘Man Who Wore All His Clothes’ series by Allan Ahlberg and Katharine McEwan – with maps and timelines to pore over. And very very funny. Other fabulously generously illustrated early chapter book favourites were Cakes in Space (and anything else) by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, and the Ottoline (and later, Goth Girl) books by Chris Riddell.

OUR EARLY CHAPTER BOOK SHELF

When Herbie got to be 5 or 6 he started bringing home a ‘Reading Book’ in his school bookbag. It would usually be a Biff & Chip Oxford Reading Tree book – and I do like these…

BUT….

(1) it was usually not the next one in the series and

(2) Herbie knew that he had to read it to us, and that a sort of test was going on.

And that sucked all the fun out of reading.

Then: we discovered the whole of Harry Potter, the books AND the films. When I asked Herbie if he wanted to read Harry’s bits in The Philosopher’s Stone, he said “Yes” – and he carried on reading Harry’s part right through to the Deathly Hallows. And this was brilliant, as I could stop feeling guilty because I was hearing Herbie read – plus he had to follow the words on the page to know when to come in when Harry spoke.                                                 

 

HARRY POTTER, Illustrated by Jim Kay: a hearth to gather around

Parents often stop reading to their children when the kids are able to read independently, which is generally when they start reading chapter books on their own, at about 7 or 8 or 9. But just because your child can read independently doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy being read to. I’m a grown-up, and I love being read to.

There are big benefits to be had for reading together with the 11-13 yr olds and the teenage crowd – especially having something to talk about together, and if you’re reading non-fiction, shared topics to talk about.

Now Herbie’s dad also likes reading together, so at story time it would be the three of us (and the parent who wasn’t reading would often doze off). So we had the massive advantage of two parents who want to do story time together, and also the massive advantage of having only the one child – we didn’t have to negotiate story time with differently aged offspring.

a shelf of a few of our utter favourites

And there we went on our journey through picture books to classics (all the books I loved as a child that I couldn’t wait to read with Herbie) to chapter books to factual books to grown up books via Dickens and Jane Austen and Dan Brown; to science fiction and Isaac Asimov; the whole of James Herriott and Gerald Durrell. We learned the value of reading books you don’t get on with (and the rights of the Reader to abandon a book) – and we found that thinking about why we didn’t like a particular book could help us discover why we loved the books that we loved. We read the things none of us might choose to read just for ourselves.

We mined seams of favourites: Andy Stanton, Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart’s Far Flung Tales and Muddle Earth books, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman. We hung out at the library finding the next place to start drilling.

We travelled with our reading book and it was our secret weapon to make time fly – I remember us reading The Time Machine (retold from the HG Wells) on a train back from London and having reluctantly to stop to get off the train at Oxford…

Mark Haddon’s Curious incident of the Dog in the Night-time was interesting: to read out the swearing or not? (I decided to read it out.) Reading A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay – we discovered our faces were wet.

OUR LATER CHAPTER BOOK SHELF

I discovered books that I wouldn’t choose usually that are pure wonderfulness, often on the recommendation of booksellers: for example, Judith Kerr’s How Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. We had big discussions about world-building reading La Belle Sauvage. I found some things just didn’t work read aloud: my super-favourite E Nesbit Five children & It – just didn’t ring right. But Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers was still fresh and funny. Our very last books: were, I think, Peter Godfrey Smith’s Metazoa, and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (read for all the laughs and accents by Herbie’s Dad.)

Some of our reading in the last few years

But now, at 16 and starting his A level year – for now, maybe for ever, for us daily story time has stopped.  But if I ever want an opinion on a text, my go-to textpert is Herbie.

Now, I do love to read aloud, and you should hear the terrible accents that I can do. But not everyone feels like that.

If no-one’s ever read to you, reading aloud is not a normal or comfortable thing to do. A recent article in the Guardian reported that most parents of young children would like to spend more time reading with them, but a third lacked the confidence to do so; “Reading out loud and doing character voices were cited as reasons for doubting their confidence.” In the same article SF Said (author of Tyger and much more) says: “It’s much better to read for a little bit than not to read at all. Just 10 minutes a day can be enough to make the difference.”

How can we empower parents to read to their children just for fun? Modelling how to do it could be useful; could teachers help parents here? Maybe schools could invite parents in to picture book storytimes with their children, maybe when the children start school, where they can experience being read to, and how it feels, and how it's possible to do it? And I wonder if reading to your child just for fun might be a more useful thing to do, than to hear your child read? (Please, opinions about this are very welcome!)

It’s worth remembering why reading to your child, just for fun, is super useful:

1.       Routine saves the day: it gives you a daily routine that helps the route to bedtime, it’s a sign that bedtime is coming.

2.      It gives you something to talk about with your child.

3.       The book does the entertaining for you, you don’t have to invent it,  just read it – so it’s a time together that’s low-stress.

4.     The books that you read together can unlock passions and interests that you share together.

Mini’s PICTURE BOOK SHELF

And now I want to return to picture books.

 I’m not a great reader: I find it hard to settle down and read. I read very slowly, at about the speed I’d read it out loud.

I think picture books are great way in for those who find reading hard, to get right into a story and be able to discuss it on a level platform.

We are all expert readers of pictures. Pictures are open ended. In pictures you can say very complex things, things that it would take an enormous number of words to explain. Often the illustrator may not realise why they’ve made the picture how it is – but there will be a reason, even if its subconscious or accidental…So pictures are open to everyone’s interpretation.

There is no right answer when you’re talking about a picture: the picture is a world of possibility. So books with pictures should be available to all children of all ages.

The secret power of picture books – with their words & pictures, is their very wide span of accessibility. The picture book performance is a collaboration; the picture book’s audience includes the adults.

The pictures feed the words, and the words the pictures, in a collaborative relationship, each adding depth to the other.

 

 

Here are all the books that I’ve featured, in order:

That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown by Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton, Shoe Baby by Joyce Dunbar and Polly Dunbar, Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, The Cat Who Got Carried Away by Allan Ahlberg and Katharine McEwen, Cakes in Space by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne and Ernest Shepard, Ottoline and the Yellow Cat by Chris Riddell, Man on the Moon by Simon Bartram, Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper, Two Frogs by Chris Wormell, Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan, The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers,  The Arrival by Shaun Tan, Tatty Ratty by Helen Cooper, The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, Truckers by Terry Pratchett, Mr Gum by Andy Stanton and David Tazzyman, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett, Boom! by Mark Haddon, Corby Flood by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce, Varjak Paw by SF Said; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay, The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, Muddle Earth by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, The Song From Somewhere Else by AF Harrold and Levi Pinfold, The Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman, All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott, Natural Histories by Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss, Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sidney Padua, The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson, Paradise Sands by Levi Pinfold, Mammal Takeover by Abby Howard, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and Chris Mould, The Hideaway by Pam Smy, Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmons.

I didn’t have room for the many many more that we’ve loved.

 

 

 

Mini's latest book is The Greatest Show on Earth, published by Puffin.