Some Advice
How to Read Aloud Well
An American father once said to me, ‘So how do you do this read-aloud thing?’ I was almost too taken aback to answer. Wasn’t it obvious? Then I realised that it wouldn’t be obvious if he hadn’t been read to as a child. I wanted to say: ‘Well, you know—find a book, call your child, and sit down and read the book to the child.’ But it was so simple that I was too embarrassed to say it.
The short road to happiness and the long road to failure
When a great story is read aloud listeners, even very young listeners, learn and understand new words that would normally be beyond them because they occur within a story they know and love, a story they hear again and again. I made up a story for Theo a few months ago in which I called a giraffe’s legs ‘spindly’. I used the word ‘spindly’ for some weeks and then thought that ‘spindly’ was really too grown up for a little kid so I one day I said ‘thin’ instead. He looked at me, puzzled and confused for a moment and then said, as if were an idiot, ‘You mean “spindly”!’
Parent Talk May 2013
If you knew anything about me at all before today it’s probably one of two things: that I wrote Possum Magic; and I race around the world begging people to read aloud to children for at least ten minutes a day, every day, between birth and five years of age. The question is: why would we want to do that? For fun! Fun for us, and fun for them! Read The Magic Hat.
Ten read-aloud commandments
Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. From birth!