When the children were young, we would constantly read aloud to them. I had always been interested in children’s books and children’s book illustrators, so I had a fair collection even before our kids arrived. They were a mix of fairy tales and children’s stories, old and new. Mostly in English, but once the kids came, I bought books in German as well.
Before going to bed, I would pick out three
books, and Julien and Sara could each choose one for me to read aloud. The
logic behind this was to give the bedtime ritual a frame. There was a
beginning, taking a bath and brushing their teeth; a middle, which consisted of
their antics to delay going to bed; and then the last and best part, the book.
Sometimes, very rarely, I would give in and read them one more.
I would also take the children to our local
library once a week. Even when they were really small, we’d spend an hour or
two in the company of books. Julien had a long phase when he would just look at
comic books, even though he couldn’t read at the time. Somehow the comics
sparked his imagination, and he would go through the stories frame by frame.
His vocabulary was not developed enough for him to tell me what he was
“reading,” but it was evident that he loved sitting on the bench, surrounded by
boxes upon boxes of various comic series, from Tintin to Marvel. He would lose
himself in those worlds.
We also had this storytelling game we would
play once they could speak relatively well. Julien was probably about four
years old. Sara, who spoke really early, was probably three when she started
playing our story game. The rules were simple.
Either Julien or Sara would choose a random
word, such as tiger, puddle, or yellow T-shirt. I would then start the story
with, “Once upon a time...” I would set up the scene or the characters, maybe
five or six sentences, and then, in the middle of a sentence, I would stop with
an “...and then...” and clap my hands loudly. This meant one of them had to
continue the story where I had left off. They would say a few sentences before
clapping and passing it on.
The beauty of this game was that I could
bring into the story those aspects that held the storyline together. The kids
could let their imaginations go wild, and then I would weave everything
together. I loved it when our stories got scary or silly. Sara had no wish to
take the scary stories any further. If a big tiger was standing at the door,
she would inevitably say it was a friendly tiger that liked to play.
In the end, though, our children’s primary
school teacher (yes, they both had the same one) told us that the most
important influence in helping children to love reading later in life was
whether they saw their parents reading as well. Giui and I always read
throughout the day or in the evening, but we also had a Sunday breakfast ritual
where we were all allowed to read at the table.
Our friend Claudia would arrive with fresh
bread rolls, and after the fury of gulping down the first bites, we would
settle into our books. Or the kids would colour or draw if they did not want to
read. Classical music played in the background.
Those Sunday morning reading breakfasts
were as close to domestic bliss as it ever got.
