Reading Books for Kinder Kids

I spend a lovely noisy hour reading books for kinder kids. It’s the kinder where all our children attended…it’s even the same teacher. My children, one now adult, the other two teenagers will no longer sit and let me read picture books to them. No surprise there.

I wanted to just read

With all the talk about literacy I thought it was time I contributed. I love talking in schools, but that isn’t something that happens regularly enough and reading is often a minor part of a presentation/workshop. I wanted to just read. I took a pile of books from my own library and interspersed them with books from the library corner offerings.

Half an Hour turned into an Hour

I plan to be there for half an hour, but it turns into an hour. Kids come in and out, chose their favourites, chose new ones from my pile. They read along to Carle’s ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and ‘The Gingerbread Man’ and go off into block corner to make a boat after I’d read my story ‘Ebi’s Boat’. They count the butterflies in Sue Whiting’s ‘Taming Butterflies’ and are riveted by Michael Rosen’s ‘There’s a Bear in a Cave’.

It is great fun. I make it a regular thing

Sometimes I am running late and grab a handful of books to take with me.

One of them is I Spy with Inspector Stilton by Judith Rossell. Usually my main audience is girls with a couple of boys flitting in and out as their restless legs will take them, but today the balance was different. They LOVED Inspector Stilton, boys and girls both. I had boys fighting over the right to find the things on the page and several times had to halt the ‘finding’ to get the boys to remove their heads and bodies from the page!

After Inspector Stilton the boys stayed too, for me to read different books, ones from the kinder bookshelves. That led to a conversation about me having to go home and do some work, that work is writing stories.

All the year

I’ve been going to the kinder with this group all year, and it’s the first time most of those boys have come to join the reading with me, let alone ask questions about who I was and what I do. They were intrigued by the notion of someone actually writing stories as a job, and also by the idea that I’d brought books written by people I knew.

One other link…I’d taken Sally Murphy’s ‘Pemberthy Bear’ illustrated by Jacqui Grantford and also another story ‘Squeezy Cuddle, Dangly Legs’ Jacqui has illustrated. They were very interested to see a picture of the ‘Pemberthy Bear’ book in ‘Squeezy…’ It seemed to make sense of the notion that books are created, do not merely appear.

Aah, what a wonderful hour with these Kinder Kids.

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