Some Advice
Writing Picture Books
Books for young children are usually short. Young children aged 0-7 are themselves short. This leads to an assumption that children have small brains and writing for them is easy. The reverse it true. Young children have active, lively brains, and writing for them is difficult.
Books for young children are usually short. Young children aged 0-7 are themselves short. This leads to an assumption that children have small brains and writing for them is easy. The reverse it true. Young children have active, lively brains, and writing for them is difficult.
Only the best is good enough—the best words in the best places, and the best characters in the best stories.
The essence
Classic stories have the quality of ‘difference.’ They are here today, here tomorrow, and here the day after.
They have:
A universal theme that speaks to any child in the world
Characters readers care about
Trouble (if it’s a story)
Strange, original, or unexpected use of language
Perfect words in syllabically perfect places
The delight of happiness
No preaching or teaching
An impact that affects the heart
Rhyme, rhythm or repetition, or all three
Children saying: ‘Read it again! Read it again!’ at the end of the book.
Ideas
The best ideas, in my experience, don’t come from our heads. They come from our immediate lives, or from our memories. Emotion is the key.
Stories created solely from the imagination have a flatness about them. They’re often about things that don’t matter much. They’re here today and gone tomorrow. No one remembers them into adulthood.
When we read the classic stories that make us laugh or cry, or shiver or feel happy, it is my hunch that we could track the main idea down to a pivotal moment in the writer’s life—or several pivotal moments.
So, write from the compost of your own life: your feelings, experiences, hopes, joys, disappointments, and so on. If you do that, the reader will be able to connect with your story because it will be based on the authenticity of universal understandings.
To find an event that might be a good basis for a story it’s useful to write down a strong emotional experience remembered from childhood or even recently. Start writing with that event in mind. That way, the first draft won’t be drawn entirely from the imagination, and it will mean you’re off to a good, heart-felt start..
In order to write, first you have to have lived. Only in rare circumstances will young writers be published. So, if you’re under 23, think hard about doing something else for a while until you’ve experienced many more books, people, events, situations and emotions and … words.
A child’s heart should be changed between the first word and the final word. A heart that stays the same is the sign of a book that will fail.
Characters
If readers and listeners don’t care about the characters, or empathise and feel for them, the story will fail.
A picture book with a story (as opposed to a rhyme-and-rhythm book) needs well-drawn characters whose highs and lows and final triumph tug at the heartstrings of readers and listeners.
A famous maxim for writers is: ‘Show, don’t tell.’ So, rather than describing, explaining, stating, and enumerating, we need to show what’s happening and how characters feel about what’s happening, through what they say and what they do.
Themes
Trouble isn’t necessary in short rhyming, rhythmic, repetitive picture books such as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, and Whoever You Are, both of which have the theme of the sameness of humans around the round the world.
However, in a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, if there’s no trouble, there’s no story.
There will be a theme within that trouble, such as: ‘Big brothers are a pain.’ Or: ‘Will I make friends when I move house?’ Or: ‘Does my mother love me as much as she loves my siblings?’ Or: ‘What if lose a big game?’
Passion
To ensure we have something worthwhile to say we can test ourselves by asking ‘Is this a so-what?’ story, or will it be around forever?’
Sadly, many stories are ‘so what?’ stories, which is why so few picture books are published
Rhythm
Rhythm is the festering sore in imperfect drafts. It must be cured, totally.
Spend time on the rhythm of the first and last lines. The first sentence grabs and holds the listeners and readers. The last provides a sense of deep contentment.
The amateur writer believes rhythm can be almost right, but ‘almost’ is never good enough. Only perfect rhythm will do, and only reading aloud will show us whether the rhythm is perfect.
Rhythm needs to be in the marrow of your bones if you’re thinking of writing a picture book. I don’t mean rhymes, necessarily. I mean the perfect placement of syllables anywhere in a prose sentence, or in verse.
You’ll hear the perfection or lack of it when you read aloud what you have written.
I advise learning by heart something from Dr Seuss, Shakespeare, the King James version of the Bible, A.A. Milne or anything else in which the rhythm of the language is perfect. Get the gut-feeling of rhythm into your writing soul.
Syllable problems are solved by choosing a different word: a three-syllable word instead of a one-syllable word; or a two-syllable word instead of a three-syllable word.
Gustave Flaubert said: ‘All writing talent lies, after all, only in the choice of words.’
Rhyme
It is foolhardy to write a story with a plot (i.e. a text with a beginning, middle and end) in rhyme. Rhyme is fine and very good in books like Time for Bed, and Where is the Green Sheep? since neither is a ‘story’: the words aren’t accommodating a plot.
Rhyming stories are nearly always rejected by publishers because most would-be writers don’t know how to achieve the right number of beats in a sentence.
Repetition
My advice on repetition is: Go for it!
Children love repetition. It helps them remember the words. They love because it’s so predictable and safe, and they can join in.
Length
The biggest fault of wannabe picture-book writers is to write too much. Over 500 words means alarm bells should be ringing. I admit that Possum Magic is 502 words and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridgeis 629 words, but they are exceptions to the general rule. Where Is the Green Sheep? is 190 words.
A picture book is 32 pages. In printing, the pages are folded in half, then in 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, which is why the compulsory 32-page format exists.
Half the pages are pictures, so try to keep the word-count to a minimum and don’t explain anything that will be made obvious in the artwork.
When you’re drafting a picture book it’s useful to make your own 32-page mock-book, called ‘a dummy’, by copying all the features of a real picture book, such as the endpapers, the title page, dedication and publishing information page, and so on. The text of the story begins on page 3, a right-hand page.
Putting the text on each page will enable you to see how the page-turns pan out. The page-turns are crucial to success, especially the final turn between page 31 (right-hand page) and page 32 (left-hand page).
Your best friends are the ‘cut’ and ‘delete’ keys on your computer. At any time, you can probably cut much of what you have written, crushing though that is.
Cut as much as you can from the beginning of the text. Put your hand over the first paragraph and see if you can start on the second paragraph. If you can, try cutting that one also, and start on the third paragraph.
Why Read Aloud?
We’re writing a book to be read aloud so we ought to be reading aloud what we have written, all the time—each paragraph, each sentence, each clause and phrase, over and over again. Read from the top every so often to assess the smoothness (or not) of the story so far.
Write in total silence because you’re creating music. If there’s a fly buzzing in the room, kill it. You have to hear the lilt of the words in your head, and then hear them read aloud. Read your drafts aloud a lot.
The words in every phrase or sentence have to be able to be read with syllabic ease.
The readers of our words should never stumble or have to re-read; neither will they jerk over the words, gabble, or fumble.
Revision
Don’t be too discouraged over drafts that aren’t working. Why the hurry to be finished?
A picture book of 500 words may take two years or more to perfect and may have 40 drafts or more.
Put away the draft of a story that’s not working. Leave it alone for months. A fresh eye will reveal its faults immediately.
An essential quality in a writer is the ability to be dissatisfied with what she or he has written.
Dissatisfaction is the necessary discomfort that will lead us back to our manuscript to attempt yet another draft.
The least effective writers are the most immediately satisfied. They don’t understand the need for dissatisfaction, nor do they know what to be dissatisfied about.
Good writing has been re-written. Many times.
Good writing is full of surprises.
Good writing is correct.
Good writing adds to our quality of life by revealing life to us.
Handwrite or type?
Writing on paper makes it easier to see the text/story as a whole, easier to edit, easier to put arrows to where a piece of text might be better placed, and so on. Writing on paper also means you always a have copy of what you have written.
If you only type, make sure you print every single draft. Some of what you delete at one point may later be remembered to have been brilliant and perfect, and you’ll kick yourself if you have lost it.
What does it cost?
The only cost to a writer of getting a book published is— or should be— the initial cost of mailing the manuscript to an agent or publisher; or no cost at all, by emailing it. All the other costs are borne by the publisher. The writer is never out of pocket.
If a publisher asks you to pay for any part of the publication, such as the art, or the lay out, or the printing, you’re with the wrong publisher.
Self-publishing or not?
The decision to self-publish is yours, and yours alone, so the following advice can be taken or ignored, as you see fit...
Personally, I advise you that you don’t, under any circumstances, contemplate self-publishing, unless it’s only a few copies for your immediate family and friends. You’re likely to end up with a nasty debt and a shed full of un-sold books.
Self-publishing provides no market-research, no distribution, no publicity, no marketing, no warehousing, no advertising, and very few buyers.
Bookshops rarely buy books that established publishers haven’t endorsed. They don’t trust self-published books as they know they haven’t been ruthlessly edited or professionally designed and illustrated.
The artwork
Unless you’re an art-school-trained picture book illustrator don’t even think about doing the pictures yourself, even if you call yourself ‘an artist.’
Also, it’s pointless finding your own artist. Don’t do it. The publisher will choose the illustrator, according to the theme and tone of the text.
You will have little or nothing to do with the illustrator. You many never meet her or him. Don’t interfere. Let them get on with the job since they have the talent, not you.
If you send original art with your story, the publisher will probably reject the pictures that have been executed so painstakingly by a talented friend, but they may love your story. And then who rewards the artist financially for the time he or she has wasted doing your book? It’s not fair on the artist.
Of course, if you’re already a trained picture book artist and you are also the author, then send everything you have created.
Agents
It’s crazy not to have an agent to guide you through the intricate bastardry of publishing contracts.
Agents prevent you from being exploited and scammed.
An agent will take 10-20% of your earnings in commission. It may seem a lot, and even unfair to the uninitiated, but they work hard for the best publishing deal for you since the best deal for you provides them with more commission.
They’re worth their weight in gold. They fight for you all the way.
Find an agent through Google.
Editors
Once your book has been accepted, you’ll be assigned an editor. She or he may ask you to make many changes. If you’re lucky you may sit side by side with your editor and work together closely.
The book you sent in will not be the same as the book that’s finally published. After it’s been worked on by an editor it will be much better! Editors know best. Don’t argue with them too much. They have vast experience, and they do know what’s best.
On the other hand, don’t give in to their every suggestion, every time. You are a writer, after all.
Now what?
Send your manuscript by mail or email—it shouldn’t be more than three pages of typing in 12 font, double spaced—to one editor at a time, or to an agent if you can find one who will take you on.
Don’t be cute in your covering letter or email. It drives editors wild, and anyway they’re not influenced by it. Just say you have enclosed a story for consideration, with the date, your name and your contact details.
You may have to wait up to three months for a reply.
Rejection
Rejections from publishers are devastating. They send a message that the book isn’t ready and needs more thought. You have to be resilient.
Many a famous author has been turned down over and over again before becoming an ‘overnight’ success, so don’t be too discouraged.
Possum Magic was rejected nine times over five years before it became a publishing phenomenon.
Do bear in mind the dreadful statistic that 97% of picture books written by eager writers are never published.
(Perhaps they didn’t read my hints first. Hmmm.)
Earnings
A picture book writer earns half the royalties. The other half goes to the illustrator. Typical royalties on a picture book are 10% of the recommended retail price, shared equally between the writer and illustrator. So if a book sells for $20 the writer will receive 5%: a dollar for each book sold. Royalties can rise to 12.5% if a book sells well.
Writers are paid twice a year, six months apart, such as in September and March. Writers pay at least 10%‑15% to their literary agent. They also pay taxes. In the end it’s never even $1 dollar per $20 book, it’s much less.
This adds up to the fact that most writers don’t become millionaires. Just saying…
Writing Do’s and Don’ts
DO read recent picture books over and over again.
DO make friends with a bookseller or librarian or storyteller: their advice and guidance can be enormously helpful.
DO be original: try not to copy the ideas or structures of recent well-known books.
DO become familiar with the nature of rhythm. Understanding brevity, rhythm, and cadence in prose will keep rejections at bay.
Writing Do’s
DO read recent picture books over and over again.
DO make friends with a bookseller or librarian or storyteller: their advice and guidance can be enormously helpful.
DO be original: try not to copy the ideas or structures of recent well-known books.
DO become familiar with the nature of rhythm. Understanding brevity, rhythm, and cadence in prose will keep rejections at bay.
DO ensure your story makes an emotional impact: the reading should change the reader.
DO ensure that the content of the story will interest both children and adults, not just adults—a common fault which might well lead to publication but will never lead to best-selling status.
DO write with narrative tension: solve a problem.
DO ’show’ and do not ‘tell’: try to reveal action and character through what the characters say and do.
DO keep the text under 500 words if possible. Minimise description. The fewer words the better, since the pictures will provide many of the visual details.
DO remember that the secret of good writing is re-writing.
DO constantly re-read drafts aloud during the drafting process: hearing is one way of perceiving what’s wrong in the text.
DO send the text to agents or publishers without any accompanying artwork unless you are both the author and the illustrator.
DO ensure the text is written grammatically, and the spelling and punctuation are correct.
DO remain confident and up-beat after rejections. Re-write, re-think and send the story off to another publisher.
DO stay out of the illustrator’s way. Interference by an overbearing author is rarely appreciated.
DO retain humility, even after a best-seller. Success may not last, and you may need the comfort of friends. Those who boast have no friends.
DO find a literary agent before you rush off on your own to try to find a publisher.
Writing Do Not’s
DO NOT write down to children. Write for clever, well-adjusted, lively children. Young readers appreciate the compliment.
DO NOT write about inanimate objects such as shoes, a coin, a kite, an ice-cube, a piece of sausage or similar. Stick to people, toys, animals, birds, engines, etc.
DO NOT use alliterative names or titles, such as Izzie the Ice Cube, Kenny the Koala or Tommy the Tired Teddy. Use names, which reveal something of the character.
DO NOT write your story in rhyme. Most editors detest rhyming stories and will reject them.
DO NOT assume that plot is the most important element in a story: character comes first. Then trouble. Next comes the precise choice of words and their correct rhythmic placement.
DO NOT find an illustrator yourself. That’s the editor’s job.
DO NOT forget that the rhythm of the text is the element that will or will not bring the reader back to the story again and again.
DO NOT write things like: he gasped, she spluttered, etc. Use the word ‘said’. The gasping and spluttering, etc., should be obvious from the situation, if the writing is effective.
DO NOT forget that if the writer couldn’t care less about the fate of the characters the readers couldn’t care less either and the book will fail.
DO NOT write stories that end: ‘…and then they all woke up.’ Dreams as stories are frustrating and are rejected.
DO NOT write to teach. Children and publishers detest heavy morals.
DO NOT attempt to bring up other people’s children through your writing.
DO NOT get the name of the children’s editor wrong (if you send a manuscript to a publisher yourself, without getting an agent first).
DO NOT forget that a literary agent will ensure you earn you far more than you can earn by yourself, even though you will pay them 10-20% of your royalties.
DO NOT forget to send a brief covering letter (that is, if you don’t have an agent to do it for you) and do not be ‘cute’ in this letter.
DO NOT be surprised not to hear from a publisher for two or three months.
DO NOT be surprised to find yourself working on a picture book text for a couple of years
DO NOT lose heart after rejections—be resilient and tenacious.
DO NOT self-publish. You will find yourself out of pocket and without a wide audience.
DO NOT expect to be accorded real respect as a writer of children’s books. It will take forever, if it happens at all.
Should we teach writing well or badly?
Once upon a time—in 1992—I found myself in Donald Graves’ house in New Hampshire. Linda Rief, a friend of mine, was friend of his, so there we were, somehow, at his place, taking tea with God himself, and his wife, Betty. To put me at my ease, since I was so clearly awestruck, Don said lovely things about my book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and asked what I was working on. I told him it was a picture book called Time for Bed due for publication the following year.
The Donald Graves Memorial Speech
Australian Literacy Educators convention, July 2012
Once upon a time—in 1992—I found myself in Donald Graves’ house in New Hampshire. Linda Rief, a friend of mine, was friend of his, so there we were, somehow, at his place, taking tea with God himself, and his wife, Betty. To put me at my ease, since I was so clearly awestruck, Don said lovely things about my book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and asked what I was working on. I told him it was a picture book called Time for Bed due for publication the following year.
‘Can you recite it?’ said Betty. ‘Let’s hear it!’
I began to recite it but was too nervous to remember the words. I asked if I might write it down. So they set me up in Don’s office with a little computer that was hot stuff at the time but can now be found only in museums.
‘Good grief,’ I thought. ‘I’m in Donald Graves’ actual office, typing on his actual typewriter.’ My fingers could barely find the keys. I came downstairs again and, feeling abnormally shy, read them the words that became Time for Bed.
Why was I so in awe of Donald Graves? So honoured to be talking about books and writing with him, and about the teaching of writing? Who was this kindly, inspiring, researcher, professor, and writer of 26 books whose methods had had such a profound and lasting effect on Australian teachers in the early 1980s, me included? What did he ask us to do? And how it was so different from what we had done before? As I wrote this speech, in honour of his influence and his passing, I came to a simple, surprising conclusion. All will be revealed.
I’ll be needing a few writing exemplars this morning in order to make my points (you might like to guess what text-types they are) so let me begin with something that appears on the surface to be inconsequential. [Read: Two Little Monkeys.]
But wait: there’s more.
Oh, that Mem Fox is a monkey!
She’s as cheeky as can be—
Much cheekier than monkeys up any big old tree!
That was only one book, but she has four—
four more new books walking out the door!
Before Donald Graves entered our heads and our classrooms we used to regard writing as a one-shot act, undertaken by students sitting in silence, and completed from beginning to end in one lesson, perhaps once a week, sometimes once a day, or for one piece of homework. The teacher gave a topic such as: ‘A day in the life of a button’; or ‘Finish this story,’ after supplying the first line. The purpose was to hand it in to the teacher for correction and grading, rather than for a genuine response to the meaning. This method of teaching writing had been around for many generations, was accepted entirely as the way things should be and was rarely questioned, although there always existed gifted, enlightened teachers working on their own, who taught writing differently.
In the late seventies and early eighties Donald Graves visited Australia many times and managed, with his famous tact and grace, and his evidenced-based research, to yank us out of our comfortable rut. He presented his research, told us a few home truths, gave us strategies and dared us to be different. We took up the challenge.
Only writers should teach writing
His first point about the pedagogy of writing—and this was the truth that threatened us most—was that only writers should be allowed to teach writing because writers alone understand the circumstances of creation. They know first-hand how writing happens and why. They have valid reasons for writing. They know about choosing a topic; they know about the early hunting and gathering of ideas and notes before pen finally hits paper or thumb hits i-Phone; (well, he didn’t actually mention the i-Phone but he would have had he known about them then.) Writers, he said, know about the sorting out of random information and how long it takes to get it settled into well-ordered paragraphs; and the necessity of rewriting draft after draft to get the right meaning across; and the work involved in writing an irresistible first line and a perfect set of syllables in the last line; and the anxiety over the possible response; the hope and terror involved; the intense conversations with others; the struggle to find what is called our ‘voice’; the precise choosing of words; the desire to achieve every aim successfully, to change the reader through the reading. Writers, he said, understand the difficulty, the joy, and the power. And with that inside knowledge writers are better able to teach writing with empathy and success.
Which meant, he said, that all of us who thought we were teaching writing had better become writers ourselves: not published writers necessarily, just writers.
What did we do as a result?
Although it terrified us, we set out to discover the difference between real writing and the stuff we had been trying to teach. We did become writers ourselves. We went to writing courses and created writing groups of our own and met in friends’ houses once a week, and wrote for real people whom we wanted to impress. We chose our own topics. We took the time we needed. We wrote in our own voices so our individual personalities could shine through. We chatted with each other about what we were writing or had written. We read our writing aloud to each other. We experienced highs and lows, and the surprising difficulties in getting writing write. (What? You mean writing is difficult?! We had previously scoffed at that idea.) We rejoiced in having real audiences and couldn’t wait for their responses. Becoming writers ourselves was the best in-service ever. It changed our lives; it changed our teaching; and it radically changed the outcomes of the students in our classes.
And what should we be doing now?
So if we ourselves haven’t written anything lately for an audience that makes us excited and nervous at the same time we might have forgotten not only how to write or why, but also how to teach writing. Might it be time to start a writing group, I wonder, to replace the reading group we currently attend.
Real writers are eager for collaboration
Becoming writers helped us to remember another of Don Graves’ insights: that real writers are eager for collaboration. They use other people’s brains to help them get their writing right: family members, friends, colleagues, editors, children, neighbours, writing groups, formal writing courses, and so on. They seek out others in an informal sort of ‘conference’ to bounce their writing off, to ask advice, to check for confusions in their writing, or things they might have left out, or ways of structuring a piece, or proof-reading, or even spelling, or—secretly—in the hope of a little praise and encouragement. We learnt all this by writing ourselves. We practically dragged people off the street to read our writing to, to beg for help, for ideas on how we might improve it.
What did we do in classrooms as a result?
We tried to forget we were in classrooms. We set up pleasantly furnished physical spaces (I remember a lot of baths with cushions in them)—social spaces that allowed children to feel more as if they were in a writer’s studio, working among friends. We allowed children to talk to us and to each other about what they were writing and why. We organised writing conferences with each child to discuss the writing in hand, allowing the child to lead the conference conversation, not the teacher. We wrote in front of children to show them our thought processes; we wrote collaboratively, with the whole class throwing in ideas; we modelled the ways writers talk about their work in progress:
What do you think of my lead? Would you want to read on or not?
Which part did you like the best?
What if I break that sentence into three sentences: that might work better.
Oh no, that’s so sad. I’m so sorry. Thank you for sharing.
And what should we be doing now?
But if we ourselves haven’t written anything for a while, anything public, that is, for an audience that causes our stomachs to flutter, how will we know the power of the of-the-cuff writing conference? We won’t be able to teach writing well unless we understand the need for such chatting in our own classrooms. So let’s do something alarming such as writing a light-hearted poem that sums up this term’s work—a poem to give to the parents on the last day of term. Now that might teach us about writing and how to teach it.
Writers choose their own focus
Donald Graves also alerted us to the fact that writers, on the whole, choose to write about their own current focus. They choose their topic. They choose their own genre. In other words, they know what they want to write and why: a journal, a letter to the paper or the pope, a novel, a protest speech, a blog—well, he didn’t actually mention a blog but he would have, had he known about blogs at the time—an appeal for funds, a family history, a child’s bedtime story, an application for promotion, to name a tiny few of the hundreds of genres available.
What did we do as a result?
It was revolutionary but we allowed children to write what they wanted to write about, what they knew about, what they cared about. We didn’t tell them the formulaic text-type they had to use, so we could all feel calm about the persuasive writing section of the Australian NAPLAN tests. (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy tests,) None of us, let alone eight year-old children, can write persuasively unless we have real steam coming out of our ears about the matter in hand. Manufactured steam just doesn’t cut the mustard. Because we were writers ourselves we remembered that kind of thing; we knew it; we felt it first hand. So we drew out from the children what the children wanted to express instead of imposing our topics on them.
And what should we be doing now?
But what if we haven’t been writers ourselves lately? What if we’ve forgotten how awful it is to be told what to write and exactly how to write it, if we can’t recall the importance of an excited, inquisitive audience ourselves? We might like to sit back for a cool moment and take stock once again, and ask ourselves earnestly what the hell writing really is. And whether it bears any relation to the manufactured horrors we’re currently inflicting on the youngsters in our classrooms in the name of literacy education—deadly formulas on the ways of writing different text-types such as the persuasive, descriptive, narrative and so on. That’s not real writing. It bears no resemblance to writing. Teaching text-types outside the context of passion and purpose, audience and response sucks the lifeblood from natural, vibrant writing and kills it stone dead. Teaching text-types is not teaching writing and never will be, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.
Real writing is a complex process
Another important lesson that Donald Graves taught us was that real writing is a much more complex process than a one-shot act; that it is literally ‘a process’, a predictable series of stages and drafts that most writers undertake between their first thought and their final piece, whether the piece takes an hour, or weeks, or several years to write.
Two Little Monkeys took four years of writing, on and off, to get the rhythm right, to end up not mentioning the leopard by name, to pace the book’s tension in the right places, to work out an ending that wasn’t trite and so on. And my cheeky advert/poem must have looked as if it had been tossed off in a single draft but on the contrary, slight though it was, I wrote many drafts as I changed its genre (advert, or poem, or both?) corrected its rhythm and refined its descriptive, persuasive tone.
What did we do in classrooms as a result?
We said to children, ‘You don’t have to get it right first time. Have a go. Write something, anything. No, there’s no special length. You can’t re-draft a blank page so get something down and go from there. I’ll chat to you about it, never fear. I won’t let you sink. Are you ready to try it out on the class? OK, let’s do it and see how the others can help. No, you don’t have to finish it right now; put it away for a while, try something else if it’s not working for you. That’s what I do. Can’t spell that word? Invent the spelling. Write it anyway and we’ll get it right later. Say what you want to say, as this child did, in a letter to me:
I want to talk about Willford Gordon whatchamacalit oh you know what. I like your book because a little boy did a big thing like Mr.Drysdale because Mr.Drysdale is big. That’s all. By Roderick
And what should we be doing now?
If we are not writers ourselves we will not know, we will not be able to understand, we will not remember that writing is a process, a slow process, an arduous process requiring draft upon draft. And we might therefore teach in an asinine fashion, making ridiculous demands such as: ‘I want this handed up by tomorrow’; or: ‘why don’t you sit this NAPLAN writing test, my little honey bun?’ To become a writer in order to be a better teacher of writers, we don’t need to go crazy and meet our writing group once a week, although that’s fun: wine, carrot cake, gossip and all. But we do need to write a minium of one or two things a year for an audience that terrifies us. Imagine one or two staff members each week, reading a piece to colleagues at the end of a staff meeting. Imagine that sweat!
Writers need a purpose, an audience and a response
Another of Don Graves’ points was that writers don’t write well or willingly without an interested and inquisitive audience. He emphasised the requirement for a real audience but told us there are three key elements in the creation of every piece of successful written communication, from cave paintings to tweeting. (Well, he didn’t actually mention Twitter but he would have, had he known about it.) The three elements were audience, purpose and response. Without an audience to care about the meaning being expressed, he said, real writers don’t write: what would be the point? And if the purpose is merely for grading, again real writers don’t write: what would be the point? And if writers are hanging out for a genuine response to what has been written and receive no such response, they’re reluctant to write for that audience again, since what would be the point?
Can you see therefore, the heart-breaking pointlessness of battering children with text-types, none of which develop passion or competence in a young writer? Audience and response, dear people: nothing else matters: text-types are chosen naturally; they arise organically, as passion and purpose surface in a writer’s brain. I ask myself—and I ask you—how I am able to write in any genre I please without ever having been taught in my 66 years of life a formulaic text-type. Invite me back next year and I’ll tell you how…
Those of us who were writing real things for each other on a weekly basis in writing groups back in the 80s understood exactly how important audience, purpose and response were, especially response. We lived and died for the response, not only to the meaning we were trying to get across, but also to the way we had constructed it.
What did we do in classrooms as a result?
We made sure that children knew their writing would be read to or by others—to a real audience of live and lively listeners so that they would write with much more care and aching and attention and excitement. We had a writer’s chair for our young writers to sit in while they read aloud their work importantly and asked for comments or questions afterwards. We helped the writers choose their best writing and published it in little books that other children could borrow in class or take home and read to their parents. We had celebratory days for the launch of first publications with party food and a speech of congratulation from someone who mattered to the children. Audience was the spur, the purpose was for a response, and response was the reason for writing. We had no tests. We tried not to grade although of course we quietly, constantly assessed.
And what should we be doing now?
Perhaps we could ask ourselves, if we haven’t written anything lately, why that might be? Apart from journal writing which—as a solitary act of stream of consciousness written mostly for our own old age—lacks an immediate audience, we are probably not writing because we don’t have an interested or inquisitive audience in own lives, an audience that might awaken a desire to write, to write often and to write to the best of our ability.
Perhaps you might think of something you want badly for your school, something that will have your own voice heard so loudly and clearly that the response will deliver your dreams. Like this email for example, which came to me earlier this year from a parent in a remote school in Queensland. It’s such a brilliant piece of persuasive writing, and filled with such voice that I’m going to let you read it yourself since that will be faster than my reading it to you, but before you read it let’s ask ourselves if this adult writer knows the formula we are now all obliged to teach about the qualities of persuasive writing. I bet she doesn’t even realise that such a sterile formula exists yet what could be more successful than this?
Dear Mem
This is most likely your first letter from Ero*******a – The furthest town from the Sea in Australia. We are far far far away from the big smoke in South Western Queensland and we have a very small school with five wonderful big hearted kids.
Like most Queensland children, they have now seen firsthand the effects of flood (the entire town was submerged to varying degrees) and unfortunately they have also seen the effects of drought.
In October, these five children are hoping to travel on camp to Brisbane and visit the Qld Museum, Science Centre, spend a day on one of the Queensland Police Boats etc. To make this possible, we like all schools, have to fund raise but with only five kids, it makes it a little bit hard and let’s face it, door knocking in an area like this is not really possible unless you have a pilot’s licence. Now, the kids don’t always miss out living out yonder, let’s take the end of year Christmas play, the kids not only get a lead role but five or six…A brain storm was had by the parents and it was decided that a one off monster raffle would be held. We plan to start the raffle in late April with the raffle rounding up in early June. We have planned various avenues of advertising including email, social media networks and flyers at local venues such as post offices, grocery stores etc (These local venues are 106 KM from us…
So here is the big ask…donations……Anything that could be raffled for example a mobile phone, vouchers, products (large or small), seconds/old stock and non productive staff members…well you get the drift….We are in need of a big item to draw in the crowds and I don’t really want to auction my hubby (the local cop, well I do, but have been told it is illegal and then there will be a fight when the winner wants to return him and for some strange reason the house has been packed up and I can’t be located)…
We hope to hear from you soon and should you require further information, please contact Mel on (That is Mel…on …not Melon but if you are willing to donate, I am fine with being called just about anything) ****** alternatively, the P and C email address is ******************* . Contact can also be made via the Ero*******a State School on *************.
Thank you so much for taking the time to consider our request and we hope to hear from you soon.Warmest regards,
The Ero*****a P and C Association
Mel must have loved writing that. I certainly loved reading it and was spurred into immediate action on her behalf. Every macro and micro thing that Donald Graves taught us about writers and writing can be found in her hysterically funny email.
This speech, too, though very different, has all the hallmarks of Donald Graves’ teaching. I found it difficult and challenging and took almost a month to write and re-write it. A friend asked me once how it was going and I said, ‘Fine, really—it’s sort of finished, but it’s boring. All I have to do now is make it interesting.’ Good grief, I thought: All I have to do now is make it interesting. The task was enormous. I thought: I’m a grandmother now. I’ve lost it. I even ended up in hospital for four days although they tried to tell me it was a viral infection not an ALEA presentation that had caused it.
What I had forgotten, in the creation of this presentation, as I forget almost every time I sit down to write, is that the writing process never changes. I had forgotten that it’s never quick; it’s never easy. I had also forgotten that it never fits comfortably into this text-type formula or that, whether it be picture books or tub-thumping convention-centre protest pieces about the teaching of genres outside the context of a reality that has meaning for the child. I had forgotten, in my anxiety to get things right, the essential writers’ maxim of: ‘Why would I write if I knew what I were going to say?’ By writing this speech, harking back to the core of Donald Graves work, I re-learnt what writing really is, and rediscovered a key insight as to how it might be better taught: by teachers becoming writers themselves.
In case you need to re-visit my opinions may I guide you to a pre-historic article on my website: Notes From the Battlefield (1988). I consider it the best thing I have ever written. (I know! I peaked early.) And should you be further interested, may I alert you also to the book English Essentials which I wrote with a colleague, Lyn Wilkinson. It explains to teachers, students and others what real writing is and how to do it well.
I could not have written this talk had Donald Graves not touched my writing/teaching life so deeply. But here I am finally, at the end of it —my speech, not my life! — having been carried on his wings as I paid grateful homage to his work, hoping that I have made a small difference to your thinking, your teaching, your students, and your own varied lives. Thank you so much.
The Folly of Jolly Old Phonics
Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide—and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.
A phonics tale of three children (with morals for teachers of reading) © Mem Fox 2008
This piece was presented at a conference of Auckland principals in Auckland, New Zealand in April 2008
Thank you. It’s great to be here. My husband is hoping I won’t have free time to buy shoes since shoes are infinitely more interesting in New Zealand than they are in Australia. Many things are more interesting in New Zealand:
the scenery, the accent, the passion for rugby and the fact that for most of last century you led the world in the teaching of reading. Your famous educators: Sylvia Ashton Warner, Don Holdaway and Marie Clay blazed a trail for the world to follow, and we in Australia followed in your footsteps like grateful children learning from wise parents. Our school children benefited massively from your wise counsel.
On my last few visits to this country however I’ve heard murmurings of discontent from your very own teachers regarding the direction some New Zealand schools are taking in the teaching of reading. It appears that far from being confident leaders with brilliant theories and practices to share with the world there’s a feeling abroad that perhaps other countries like the United Sates, with its current heavily phonicated methods, have better ideas; that programs such as the Spalding Method, Accelerated Reader and Jolly Phonics—by the very fact of their being so expensive and so well-marketed—¬must be better than anything you had before; that you’re such a tiny nation you couldn’t possibly have the best ideas, and so on. What a ridiculous notion, for heaven’s sake!
I’m here today to beg you hang on to your old way of doing things in literacy education, to continue to be to be leaders still, not followers. Leaders think. Followers don’t. Leaders have a good grasp of their subject. Followers don’t know what they’re talking about. Leaders speak with confidence. Followers fumble. Leaders have status. Followers have no status: they’re pathetic. Leaders have authority. Followers have none. So why, after being leaders in literacy, would you want to follow anyone else? In particular why would you want to adopt a single idea about the teaching of reading from the United States, a country in which literacy standards has fallen drastically over the last ten years?
Before I burst a blood vessel over this let me take a short break and read you a book of mine that seems to me to apply to principals as much as it does to pirates: read Tough Boris.
To return to our former topic, the strength of New Zealand teachers was—and still is in the main, so let’s not panic yet—that they truly understood the nature of phonics and the role that phonics played in the teaching of reading. In this speech I’m going to revisit phonics, through three parables, as it were, as a sort of revision for those of you who might have become a little hazy on the subject. Those of you who know it all—and I do apologize because I know there are many in this audience who do know it all—might like to have a little doze from time to time. Here goes…
Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide—and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.
Let me tell you about Sean first. About five years ago I received this message on my website:
Your books hold a special place in our lives, wonderful memories of baby and early childhood. Our son was able to read grade two readers at 3yrs, two months and recently a national show was aired on him called ‘genius kid’. I read to him every day from five months on and now he reads to his baby sister and has done so from the time she was three days old. I followed your advice and think ‘Reading Magic’ is one of the most valuable books ever! Mem, we can’t thank you enough for making it so easy and so much fun. Hope we meet you someday, Angie, Sean and Sarah
Angie had provided an e-mail address so I wrote back and asked if I could phone her and talk about this amazing occurrence, and we chatted for ages one Sunday morning. Lo and behold: it was the same old read aloud story—a story that never ceases to excite me, no matter how often I hear it.
Angie told me she began reading to Sean—who is now nine—from three months and that Time for Bed was the first of my books she bought.
Angie couldn’t remember exactly when she first read Reading Magic, but she was fairly certain it was when Sean was almost two years old and she claims she was an instant convert. She said she couldn’t believe it could be so simple and told lots of her friends about Reading Magic, for which I could kiss her feet. Sean’s reading developed very quickly. At 3yrs 7mths he had a reading age of 7yrs 7mths and a vocabulary understanding of a child of fourteen and half and Angie says it was just from doing the things I recommended. (What a publicist! I should employ her.)
Sean appeared on Today Tonight, a tabloid TV evening program in Australia. The segment was called Genius Kid. He was also on the front page of the main newspaper for southern Tasmania, in an article entitled ‘Smart Sean in a class of his own’. Here’s part of it:
When Russel and Angelea Galloway have trouble with their computer they turn to their four-year-old son Sean for help. ‘He normally works it out,’ Mrs Galloway said at their home near Sorell yesterday.
Sean is a gifted child with an IQ rating of 147. He has already been accepted into the high IQ organisation Mensa…
Mrs Galloway said: ‘He just seems to be good at everything yet he is a perfectly normal loving child.’At fifteen months Sean could identify all the letters of the alphabet. His maths and spelling were also rated equivalent to a seven year old.
The Galloways call themselves as ordinary people. Mr Galloway is a free-lance cameraman while Mrs Galloway is a full-time mum. Their second child Sarah was born four months ago and Sean has been reading books to her since she was two days old. Sean reads up to ten books a day.
So that’s the story of Sean. I’ll skim over the story of Justin because his story is told in full in the chapter of Reading Magic called ‘Proof’
In brief, Justin’s parents, Allan and Donna Bartlett, read aloud regularly to their son with remarkable results. Justin was twenty-one-months old when they first contacted me.
He had been introduced to books at six days old. It had seemed to his parents like a good thing to do—it added interest to the daily baby-care routine—and he seemed to like books and being read to, right from the start. By three months he clearly knew which way a book should be held, and he could even turn the pages on cue, responding to the obvious pause in reading at the end of a page. By three months!
At twenty-one months he had a speaking vocabulary in excess of five hundred words, which his mother attributed to what he had gained from books. He could also sight-read about twenty words. Incredible: before he even turned two.
You and I know that most children learn don’t learn to read at home—they learn soon after they start school, when everything they already know clicks into place with the help of a teacher. But a growing number of children is learning to read before they start school and they’re learning quickly, happily and easily, like Sean and Justin.
I need to read you Koala Lou before I tell you about the third child in my Tale of Three Children. [Read it.]
I’m happy to have made the acquaintance of my neighbourhood wonder-girl, the glorious Josephine, who was able to read anything at the age of three which is when she and I met. She is now seven. She lives in the street that runs into mine, and on Boxing Day 2004 she and her mother Liz dropped by to introduce themselves and to show me how much Josie loved my book Koala Lou. She read me the whole book, self-correcting when she needed to. Her dad is an accountant and her mum is in human resources. Neither has been an educator. They told me they didn’t know how it had happened. When I asked if they had read aloud to her, they both said: ‘Of course. All the time. Ever since she was born.’
Josephine was read the same stories repeatedly, hundreds of times. Her mother told me that Josie taught herself to read using whole words. She did not use phonics to learn new words and is very confused if this method is thrust upon her. When someone tells her that hot is made up of the sounds: huh-o-tuh, Josie quite rightly hears her otter instead of hot. When she doesn’t know a word she asks what it is, and remembers it next time she sees it, because she sees it over and over again as books are read to her and as she reads them herself. From the words she already knows she applies logic to extrapolate what other words will be in the sentence she’s reading.
Which is exactly how our daughter Chloë learnt to read, two weeks after she started school, aged four and half. She’d heard the same favourite books read time and time again, had watched the print, and had joined in. And then, like the prima donna she was, she demanded that she be allowed to read the books herself, preferably on audio-tape so she could listen to herself later. When she didn’t know a word I told her what it was immediately so she was never held up, so she could keep the story going, so she could storm ahead with blind courage.
‘You will tell me the difficult words, won’t you, Mummy?’ she’d say, as she launched, pell-mell and fearlessly, into reading a story she loved. I remember two words in particular, in different books, which she hesitated on: cosy andinvestigation. I told her what they were. A few pages later, when the same words reappeared, she read them without any hesitation whatsoever. And of course she saw them again and again during repeated, joyful, shared readings of those same books.
When children learn to read before school without any lessons, they do so because they’ve been looking at the same print over and over again as they’ve listened to the same language, in the same stories, which have been read so many times that their parents are driven to distraction. Not only does the print become familiar, language becomes familiar.Learning to read is much more about learning language that it is about making sounds from the letters on a page. It stands to reason that it’s going to be easier to readdriven to distraction if we’ve heard driven to distraction over and over again, than if we’ve never heard that phrase. In certain situations, the moment we read driven to we’re going to expect a word like distraction to follow, and the print will confirm it.
Anyway, that’s the end of my Tale of Three Children and Chloë. What implications does my tale have for teachers of reading?
Most methods, at most schools, tend sooner or later to get most children reading. Research tells us it’s the teacher, not the method, that makes the difference. However, in the light of recent movements and arguments in the teaching of reading, it’s important to understand the intricacies and meaning of phonics which is basically the ability to sound to break words up into smaller pieces and sound them out, as in: c-a-t says cat.
And where does phonics fit into reading education? Before we go any further we need to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: what is reading? It’s making meaning—please hang on to that piece of information—it’s making meaning, not sound, from the marks we see on the page. Take this sentence: ‘There was a tear in his…’ We can’t say the sound of the word ‘tear’ unless we know its meaning in the sentence: is it a tear in his eye, or a tear in his shirt? Merely sounding out the phonics of t-e-a-r gets us nowhere: context is all important. Which is why random words lists are such a idiotic idea.
It transpires—and I find this fascinating—that children like Sean and Justin and Josephine, who learn to read without any lessons, and could read fluently at the age of three, never sounded out words phonically as they learnt to read. In other words advanced readers don’t use phonics, even at the age of three. They, and we who are fluent readers, use phonics only after we have learnt to read, when we meet difficult, multi-syllabic words that we can’t make sense of by the usual logical means: through print, or grammar, or a prior understanding of what we have just read, or through general knowledge.
We use phonics when we realise we’ve spelt something incorrectly, as I did earlier when I was writing the word ‘capability.’ I had to break it up into the five syllables to get it right. Phonics was really useful in that situation. In fact we can’t write without phonics which is why we should be teaching reading at the same time as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—and so son..
Phonics is also useful when we come to a word we don’t know, such as the Polish surname that the Sydney entrepreneur, Richard Pratt was born with: Przetitzki, which is very difficult for English speakers to read, unlike: ‘The cat sat on the frigging mat.’
But a capability in phonics doesn’t mean competence in reading. It’s quite possible to read with all the correct phonics in place and yet not to be reading at all. For example, I can read phonically correctly the entire Indonesian edition of my picture book Hattie and the Fox without understanding a word I’m saying:
‘Ya, ya, ya!’ kata babi.
‘Peduli apa?’ kata domba…
Correctly sounding out the words is not reading, it’s barking at print, retrieving no meaning at all from the text. So it’s disappointing to discover that many parents, politicians and even a few principals think that decoding phonics correctly is indeed reading. I’m sure you’ll agree that getting the phonics right is completely pointless in the ‘”Peduli apa?” kata domba’ situation,.
Only 50% of the words in English are phonically decodable This is a a nuisance, especially for the mad keen phonic-ators among us. It’s my sincere hope that we’re able to go beyond a 50% literacy level in Australia and New Zealand. We have, actually. We’re always in the top four in the world after Finland, and sometimes Canada. The Finns have an unfair advantage over us: their language, like Indonesian and Italian, is phonically simple.
And if phonics is so important, so fundamental, so essential—as so many claim—and so crucial to our ability to make meaning from text, how come we can read the following with ease?
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae: the rset can be a toatl mses but you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae we don’t raed ervey lteter but the word as a wlohe.
So, hey, waht does this say abuot the improtnace of phnoics in raeidng? Prorbalby that phonics ins’t very imoptrnat at all. How apcoltapyic is that, in the cuerrnt licetary wars!
As if that weren’t proof enough that phonics is useful but not essential, here’s more: how can it be possible that the billions of people in China and Japan, Korea and Taiwan learn to read when there is no phonics possible in their written language, which is displayed, instead, in pictographs? Children in China have to be told what a word is and then learn to recognise it and memorise it. Amazing what they achieve, isn’t it? All those billions of people, deprived as they are, poor things, from the apparently essential benefits of phonics, becoming competent in literacy.
Sadly, let me say this again: phonics-mad literacy terrorists truly, madly, deeply believe that’s making sounds is all there is to reading. How sad. How pitiful. As if we’d lie in a bath on Friday night and read The Da Vinci Code aloud. Most of us read silently when we read at all. Within that silence meaning is made, and within that silence we’re able to read much more quickly than we do when we read aloud.
When we force poor little reluctant readers to read to us and when we tell them to sound out words they don’t know, instead of simply giving them the word, they tend to read so slowly that they make little sense of the print and receive no joy from it. (‘Giving the word’ is what the parents of young early readers are know to do.) Children who are reluctant, remedial readers may perhaps be able to complete a little book tortuously and phonically correctly, but there’s no reward in it, no excitement or passion, or emotion of any kind.
These unfortunate children don’t love reading because they’ve never been read to. They can’t see the point of reading, because they don’t receive meaning or fun or value from it, even though they can decode words nicely. How ironic it is then, that we tend to each phonics heavily to the very children who need phonics least: the confused children, the ones who can’t yet read.
Sadly, because of the money to be made from phonics programs, and the ease with which these programs can be tested and ‘researched’ phonics has been claimed in the USA in particular to have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be the best method to teach reading. If we scratch a quick-fix, sure-fire method of ‘curing’ reading difficulties we will often (but not always) find behind it a core group from an education publishing house, or a government department, or an institute in a university which stands to gain massively, financially, from their endeavours. Many expensive programs that you and I see in use in classrooms are earning bucket-loads of money on the basis of a flawed understanding of reading, and a wilful misinterpretation of research. It sickens me.
The current methods used to teach reading in the USA are causing such a worrying decline in reading standards that many American states have hired teachers from Australia and New Zealand who are working at this moment to improve literacy in failing schools. There are in 536 of these teachers in New York alone.
Why would you and I even contemplate changing from the best methods in the world to the least effective? In Australia, due to the methods we use to teach reading, 66% of Australian children list reading as one of their favourite pastimes. How good is that?! I feel inordinately proud of that statistic.
It’s simple: children who arrive at school without any exposure to books, print, pictures, page-turning, and gorgeous stories that lighten up their lives need only that when they arrive in school: an enormous and intense exposure to books, the same books over and over and over again; an exposure to print through Big Books and to the details in the pictures; they need to experience page-turning; lots of chat about what’s going on in the story and about the funny things in the pictures; gorgeous stories that lighten up their often sad lives; and lively teachers who switch them on to loving books, and who create a longing to be able to read. A phonics-first-and phonics-only approach can never in its wildest dreams achieve the same effect. I mean, compare this kind of literacy-learning with a phonics lesson: read The Magic Hat. A multitude of explicit phonics lessons can be taught from the pages of joyful books by teachers who are excited by teaching—teachers who make children excited about learning.
Do we want children whose backgrounds (both rich and poor, let’s get that clear: this isn’t about monetary disadvantage it’s about a read- aloud disadvantage)—do we want children whose backgrounds have lacked books to be resurrected into literacy in our classrooms or crucified on the cross of phonics? I certainly know which I’d choose. [In my second presentation tomorrow I’ll be explaining in detail your vital role in making this happen.]
The funds currently directed into the miracle cures and quick fixes in reading—out of which publishers make billions of dollars—would be better used in schools by providing children with a class library of appropriate classics that have been adored for years, instead of the mind-numbing ‘readers’ currently in vogue. With this kind of action—who knows?—we might even wipe out illiteracy in a single generation. How about it? We could at least try.
Notes from the battlefield
I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the thick of it all I will try to explain from the battlefield why I write and why other write around me. I’ll also try to puzzle out, from the perspective of a war correspondent who stands back and observes, why there are so many deserters out there, refusing to take up their pens and write alongside me. Is it becausethe wages aren’t good enough? Is it because there’s nothing worth writing for? Is it because it’s only a pretend battle with pretend rewards for pretend winners? We’ll see.
Towards A Theory Of Why People Write
(This article was first published in ‘Language Arts’, Vol. 65 No. 2 Feb. 1988)
I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the thick of it all I will try to explain from the battlefield why I write and why other write around me. I’ll also try to puzzle out, from the perspective of a war correspondent who stands back and observes, why there are so many deserters out there, refusing to take up their pens and write alongside me. Is it becausethe wages aren’t good enough? Is it because there’s nothing worth writing for? Is it because it’s only a pretend battle with pretend rewards for pretend winners? We’ll see.
Research on how writers write has been illuminating. We choose our own topics, decide our own purposes, target our own audiences, take our time, draft and redraft, talk over our writing with trusted friends and colleagues, and publish our pieces if we’re lucky. As a teacher I’ve applied these writers’ conditions in my classes and I’ve noticed, of course, a consequent improvement in the effectiveness of my students’ writing.
What interests me now is not so much how writers write, but why we write. What drives us to do it in the first place? And then what makes us want to do it well? If I can find the answers to these questions I might dare to ask myself another: what are the implications for teachers of writing?
When I was still in the hunting and gathering stage of this book, lost in a wilderness of notes, my husband came in to give me a cup of coffee.
“You look really tired,” he said.
“I am,” I replied, “but I don’t mind. I like doing this because it matters.” I heard myself say “it matters” and my mind leapt to its feet in a single bound. So that was why I wrote: because it mattered. Was this already an answer to one of my questions?
I wondered immediately why it mattered. First, I’d been asked to write it by people whom I liked and admired, so I felt I had to demonstrate my worthiness. I know that an expert is anyone from out of town, but I wanted to prove it to my American readers. It also mattered because of the effect I hoped it might have on me, on you, and on our teaching. I wanted to make a contribution to our thinking, to create a reaction, to cause us all to shift our attitudes somehow, no matter how uncomfortable that shift might be. I wouldn’t have dreamt of stumbling into this battlefield and sweating over such an enormous project had I not ached with caring about the insights I wanted to share and the response I was trying to achieve. I had, clearly, a huge investment in this piece of writing.
I used three phrases in that last paragraph which I’ll be reiterating throughout this chapter. Whenever you read them, I’d be grateful if you’d think of yourself first as a writer and then as a teacher of writing, and ask yourself when you or your students last ached with caring over what you were writing, or wrote because it mattered, or wrote because you had a huge investment in your writing.
Let me begin to focus on caring by way of another story. I teach a compulsory preservice course in language arts to first-year teacher education students. For some years we set the following assignment: that students should write a letter to the parents of a class of imaginary children explaining the recent innovations and peculiarities in the teaching of reading and writing. It was never brilliantly executed. It was not a real letter, it was an assignment to be marked. It didn’t matter to the students; they had only a temporary investment in it which was to pass the course and they certainly didn’t ache with caring over the response because the audience was imaginary and the response therefore impossible. We don’t set that assignment anymore because something occurred which taught us a great deal.
At the time of this assignment, a literacy crank well known in the letter columns of our local press wrote yet another letter to the paper. This time it was in horrified protest at the slovenliness of the “process approach” to the teaching of writing. Three of my students were up in arms about it and decided to write a reply. They huddled together for hours drafting and arguing. They were in and out of my office all day reading me this sentence and that. I watched them do that T.S. Eliot thing of engaging in “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”. They ached with caring because it mattered. They worried about the spelling and punctuation, not wanting the geriatric literacy freak to jump on them and say, “I told you so!” And then, bliss and heaven, it was published!. With a huge headline! It was picked up by talk-back radio and the lines ran hot for half an hour. What a response! What a real reason to write.
At the same time as that real letter was published the same three students handed in their pretend letters to the parents. I found it hard to believe that students who could on the one hand write so well could on the other write so indifferently. The development of their writing skills in their letter to the paper was palpable, but it didn’t flow over into their imaginary letter for the simple reason that “let’s pretend” isn’t real, doesn’t matter, lacks any investment, and won’t get a worthwhile response.
If, as this story might imply, language develops only when it is used “for real”, then might I suggest that we’re currently wasting a lot of time by setting unreal writing tasks in our classrooms: filling-in-the-blanks exercises, copying-chunks-from-encyclopedias exercises, make-believe job applications, “Answer-ten-questions-on-Chapter-Six” exercises, pretend-letters-to-parents exercises, and so on. You and I don’t engage in meaningless writing exercises in real life—we’re far too busy doing the real thing. And by doing the real thing we constantly learn how to do the real thing better. Giving unreal writing activities to our students is about as useful as giving occupational therapy for stroke victims to people who are in perfect health.
Among the various drafts of this chapter are sixteen different leads, one of which has currently ended up in my final paragraph because there it’s effective: it helps me to sum up and conclude on a powerful note. It would have been crazily unconnected to have kept it at the start of the chapter, but I might have left it there had i not cared about you, my audience, my readers. I wanted you to understand clearly the meanings I was making because they’re important to me. The result? I revised. I developed as a writer by developing my writing, which sounds tautologous, but isn’t. If the children in our classes don’t care about their readers, how can they develop as writers? They can’t, because they won’t care about what they’re writing, and they won’t want to revise.
Here’s another example of caring being the key to development. It isn’t about writing, it’s about speaking but I think you’ll see why I want to relate it. In their first semester at college all my first year students take a course with me designed to improve their own writing and reading, speaking and listening. For years they have told each other stories in class, recited poems in class, designed and performed choral speaking in class, and read aloud picture books and excerpts from children’s novels in class, always to the same audience: their peers. It was merely satisfactory. One year, in a blinding realization of my own stupidity at the meagre purpose of these “in-class” assignments, I organized twenty-eight groups of students, about four to six in each group, to visit twenty-eight different real classes in schools close to the college. Their task was to devise and perform a half-hour program of story and song, recited poems and choral poems, picture book readings, and enthusiastic raves about appropriate novels—anything, in fact, which would enhance their listeners’ language development. I called the assignment “Language Alive”.
How can I describe the difference in my students’ attitude and commitment? It was as if I’d asked them in the past to potter along country lanes in some old Model T Ford and was now surprised to find them screaming down the straight in top gear in the Adelaide Grand Prix. Dreading the imminent and real audience galvanized them into quite a different sort of action: they ached with caring about the response and rehearsed for hours outside class times.
My students’ enjoyment of language was extraordinary. I was moved by how happy they were, astounded by how hard they worked, and stunned by how much they developed. I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development, and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine. It’s all so obvious that I feel rather shy about telling these stories.
I recall my daughter, Chloë then aged sixteen, being embattled with an important Matriculation assignment: a six-thousand-word reflection on her involvement in the Matric play, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds”. Every so often she would read bits of her piece to her father and to me. Being so caught up in my own writing must have made me a highly unsatisfactory audience. One evening she read this:
“We realized we had no live rabbit. The problem of the rabbit was one that was to hang over us—no! Not us, me—for what seemed to be an extremely long time. The production began to be divided into three distinct periods: B.T.R. (Before the rabbit); D.T.R. (During the rabbit); and A.T.R. (After the rabbit). I look back on the weeks B.T.R. with considerable affection.”
She stopped suddenly, looked at me, and said, “You’re not laughing enough!” I was chastened. Her purpose in reading it had been to make me laugh. I had merely smiled and it wasn’t anywhere good enough for her. I hadn’t noticed how much she’d ached with caring.
When she read sections of the same piece to my husband, it was to ensure that the content is sufficiently detailed and the writing sufficiently alive. “Is this what they want?” she asked. My husband was a Matric Drama moderator so from him she was looking for the response of an expert. From me she wanted the response of a clown. We provided these responses and she was encouraged to continue.
I wonder how often I’ve given my students an opportunity to write a piece which might have two or more purposes: to make someone laugh, for instance, as well as to fulfil the requirements of a formal assignment. Have I ever given any indication that I enjoy laughing and would be quite happy to roll around the floor in hysterics while I’m marking their assignments? Do I allow students to hear me laughing over their writing, so that they’re encouraged to write again? Yes, sometimes I do. I have a loud laugh and have often been asked to “shush” when I’ve disturbed other groups of readers and writers in my class by laughing over someone’s writing. But that disturbing laugh is important: it indicates to my students that their writing is effective and therefore worthwhile. My red nose and blotchy eyes are similarly important: “Hey, guess what, guys? Mem really cries if your writing makes her sad.” In other words, if they have ached with caring over what they’ve written, they know I will ache with caring over my response.
One more related story: my position as a published writer in the college means that colleagues view me, erroneously, as an ideal person to talk to about their own writing although I am acutely aware that anyone can respond to a draft in terms of what’s confusing, boring, missing, or riveting. Be that as it may, a colleague in environmental education came into my office once, so aching with caring over mining in national parks that, as he began to read the ending of his first draft of an open letter to the South Australian minister for the environment, he actually wept. I couldn’t believe it! He cared so deeply about the potential response from the minister, he wanted so much to transform the minister’s ideas and to alter the minister’s actions that he was in and out of my office all day with newly refined drafts. The final letter was tremendously powerful. I wish I could discover what sorts of things my students care enough about to make them weep with worry as they try to get their writing right.
Chloë, my drama queen, understands the thrust of my academic passions as a teacher of the teaching of writing and is wary of it. She looked up from her own writing one evening and said challengingly, “I’m not enjoying this, you know. I hate writing.” She was attempting to undermine my thesis, but I didn’t kill her. I have other ways of doing battle. Instead, I returned the challenge: “Well, how come you like writing to J.J. so much? You haven’t even met her.” J.J. was her New York pen friend. I had set the trap and she fell right into it. This was her reply: “Well, I’m making friends with her. We like each other. You get to know people through letters. She writes excellent letters and so do I. We’re friends.” Aha! She’d admitted to caring about the relationship.
Mitchell and Taylor (1979), in their pivotal and still relevant paper on audience/response model for writing state: “…the writing on the page is not a concrete object but one portion of a relationship.” All writing, that is, not just letter writing. I know, intellectually, that language is an interactive, social process but I’m only just beginning to understand what that means, emotionally. My writing, I’m realizing, nearly always has the socially interactive purpose of either creating relationships or ensuring that established relationships continue. I’m being terribly careful about how to behave in the minefield of this first chapter because you, dear reader, matter to me so much. Your possible reaction keeps me nervous and on my toes.
Whenever I write, whether it’s a picture book, or my journal, or a course handbook for students, or notes for the milkman, there’s always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I’ve written. The watcher is always important. I’ve discovered I never write for people of no importance. Showing my writing to that watcher makes me feel weak and vulnerable and almost incapable of battling on. My shakiness over the first draft of this paper for example, was so extreme that, while my husband was reading it, I had to leave the room. My only other responder was a woman friend and colleague whom I knew I could trust. I knew she’d still like me even if, in her opinion, I’d written rubbish. Our relationship was, thank God, unassailable.
The more I admire my potential readers the more carefully I write and the more often I revise. Recently I wrote a student handbook for the second semester aware, of course, that I was continuing a well-established and hilarious relationship with my students. Of much more importance, however, was the colleague with whom I was about to teach the course. I look up to her. I try to emulate her. I admire her. I wrote the handbook for her, battling over it for weeks. I wanted to bask in the warmth of her praise and gratitude. The handbook was an enormous personal investment in my continuing relationship with her. My writing was currency and her response was my dividend.
How often are our students able to receive a response from someone they particularly admire? Some of mine (but never enough of them) admire me. As their teacher I am temporarily important enough for them to ache with caring about what they write for me. Or am I fooling myself? They never write anything for me that isn’t also read aloud in class. Is it the response from that wider audience which makes their writing matter? I don’t mind what it is as long as someone’s response makes them care enough to write effectively, for without that caring how can their writing develop through revision?
I had been corresponding with the children from Hallam and Berwick Primary Schools in Victoria for years. In 1987 we finally met. I arrived armed with photographs of my house, my pets, and my family. We had established such an excellent relationship that the children were sad Malcolm and Chloë couldn’t come too because they felt they knew them. But Malcolm and Chloë had written them letters which I read aloud:
Dear Berwick and Hallam kids,
Please keep my mother for as long as you like. I only want her back for Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Why do you like her so much?
Love Chloë
Dear Hallam and Berwickites,
I must have Mem back within twenty-four hours or she’ll turn into a toad. Please look after her carefully and return her in one piece.
Much love, Malcolm.
When I arrived home on the following evening neither Malcolm nor Chloë wanted to hear anything about my trip except the children’s response to their letters. Whenever I steered the conversation to more exciting matters, they demanded further, deeper, more fulsome news of the reactions from each of the twenty-six classes. They had written for the purposes of getting a reaction and maintaining a relationship. I was irritated until I realized they were providing me with data for my research into why people write.
I think we tend to forget about this element of relationships when we teach writing. Are we aware of how much our students dread having their writing knocked back? Do we trample on their vulnerability when they limp in, unarmed from the battlefield? Do we remember how much the caring over their writing is often also an aching to make friends, with us, and with their mates? It’s hard to keep in mind the painful wounds of battle and the importance of mateship unless you’ve been wounded yourself. Teachers of writing who have been soldiers themselves, engaged in a writing battle, must be able to empathize more closely with the comrades in their classrooms than teachers who are merely war correspondents at the hotel bar, as it were, watching the battle from a safe distance, declining to get in there and write themselves.
When the refreshing ideas of Donald Graves swept through our writing classes in the early eighties, I believed that the ultimate purpose in writing was the response, by someone, that what had been written was worthy of publication and was then published. Since then I have become a published writer myself and I realize how wrong I was. It’s what happens beyond publishing that’s important: it’s the response to my work that matters. Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge has been published in both England and the United States. In America it is loved and I’m feted for it. In England no one seems to know about it, except for my sister, so I get no response, so I get despondent, and wonder why I ever bothered to write it. Then I come home again and a colleague comes into my office and sobs hysterically for two hours. She’s just read the book and is overcome because her own mother has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a wonderful response.
Yet another story! When I left Australia aged six month, I was Miss Partridge. When I came back in 1970, I was Mrs. Fox. Friends of my parents called Mr. and Mrs. Bunney (yes, really!) looked after us in those first few months and helped us to settle in. Bronte Bunney later employed me and we worked together at the college for fifteen years, often laughing over the ridiculousness of our surnames. When Bronte retired, I wrote him a tiny book called The Bunney and the Fox. It was published. I “published” it myself. I couldn’t find him on that last Friday afternoon and I longed to find him to watch his response as he read the book. I was desperate. I’d heard he’d be clearing out his office on the Saturday morning. I went there. He wasn’t. I drove to his house. He was out. I was ready to scream. In the end I left it by his front door knowing gloomily that I’d never see his response, I’d just have to wait to hear it. Here’s the book:
The Bunney and the Fox
Once upon a time there lived a Partridge and a Bunney. The Bunney was beautiful and brilliant but never bashful. And he was always busy. One day, far across the world, the Partridge turned into a Fox. And not long afterwards she travelled to the place where the Bunney had his home. For a long time the Bunney and the Fox worked happily side by side. Not much changed except that besides being beautiful and brilliant the Bunney was also very kind to the Fox. He encouraged her greatly and said nice things to her face and behind her back. And the Fox became so used to having the dear Bunney around that when the Bunney went away—as indeed he did—she wondered, with a lump in her throat, whether she really could live happily, ever after.
I can’t imagine my students ever chasing anyone around the countryside in a desperate craving for a response to their writing but that is my goal.
There are responses and responses, some of which are financial. I wrote Sail Away partly to make money. I have earned such a sum from Possum Magic that I had been continually running after myself in order to pay the provisional tax. In fact, for a long time after Possum Magic I labored under the illusion that the financial benefits of writing were among my purposes for putting pen to paper. I’ve come to discover that this isn’t really the case.
Several years ago I wrote a long and passionate newspaper article for the on why we send our precious only child to the local state high school instead of to a private one. I was paid for this article in March. For some reason was never been published. Every Sunday morning I would stagger bleary-eyed down the drive in my battered blue dressing gown and ripped open the paper in a fever of anticipation.
Nothing! I realized two things: first, I wanted to be published more than I wanted to be paid. Second, it was the reaction to my piece that I longed for. Publication was merely the first hurdle along the road to response.
Nevertheless, knowing that cash can be a tremendous incentive, I did suggest at a crowded workshop at Teachers’ College, Columbia University that we pay children for what they write before we put their pieces into a class library. Wouldn’t you think that a writing seminar in New York, of all places, would be full of hustlers? But no! Lucy Calkins was speechless. Was it with horror? And Shelley Harwayne was in hysterics. In spite of that, I bravely paid eleven of my students for the privilege of publishing their writing in a booklet called “Picking Up the Pieces”, a booklet designed to demonstrate to other students what I believe effective writing to be. If royalties are a post-publication response which matters enough to make my students ache with caring, I think it’s worth considering, outrageous and grubby though it may seem at this moment. If it’s good enough for real writers, why isn’t it good enough for real student writers?
I think it might be safely said that in general people don’t expect to write much after they’ve left school, except when it’s absolutely necessary, as a tool, in letter writing for instance, or when it’s part of their work. In short, it’s seen as a chore. The view that writing might be fun, or amusing, or relaxing is not, I imagine, widely held, and we teachers must be to blame for that.
During the writing of this chapter a letter arrived from one of my publishers, exhorting me to write a poem for their forthcoming volume for children called “Vile Verse”. I put the letter away. But when the going got tough, the tough got going. In the same way as one searches for handkerchiefs to iron when the strain of ironing shirts becomes too much, I began to work on a poem, as a form of relaxation. I remembered with delight the groans of disgust from kids who’d heard my first putrid poem, “The Teacher’s Cold”, and set to with energy to write the following:
“Sweet Samantha, Unrefined”.
When sweet Samantha eats her food
She is exceptionally rude:
Her mouth is always open wide
So you can see the view inside.
It’s not a pretty sight, my friends,
To see how Sammy’s dinner ends-
Across her tongue the pieces float
Around her teeth, towards her throat:
You almost vomit while she chews
And tells you all the latest news!
It’s terrible when fish and chips
Come shooting forth between her lips
Or when she’s eating lamingtons
And bits of coconut grow wings
And catch you right between the eyes-
Your stomach soon begins to rise!
But scrambled egg is quite the worst:
It looks as though her cheeks will burst
With all the stuff which fills her mouth
From east to west and north to south.
My dears, it is a frightful sight
When sweet Samantha takes a bite,
So my advice is stand well clear
Especially when she starts to cheer,
And do make sure that you have dined
Before, Samantha, unrefined,
Attacks her stew and starts to chew
And sprays her food all over you…
As I wrote that very vile verse, I realized that my purposes for writing anything never come in ones but always in twos and threes or more. Firstly, I wrote it because it was fun. I also wrote it for Chloë because I knew it would disgust her and that we’d laugh over it together, thereby building on our continuing relationship. I also wrote it for Malcolm who was tapping away on a calculator looking very despondent over our finances. I knew it would cheer him up, not only because it was so revolting but also because it would earn a dollar a line if were published, thereby enabling him to pay at least $28 off the Visa bill. And lastly I wrote it for the children of Australia as an antidote to the honeyed sweetness of my Possum Magic and Hattie and the Fox.
I hadn’t realized how often I wrote for fun until my Malcolm read the first draft of this paper and said, “I’m amazed that you haven’t explained how writing is central to your life. It fascinates you. It rewards you. It fatigues you. Nowhere have you actually said you can’t live without writing.” Can’t live without writing? Had I heard correctly? I loathe writing! It’s so easy to do badly and so difficult to do well that I quail before each new writing task. I particularly detest the battle to produce a picture book story in less than 750 words. Of course I can live without writing—or can I?
One day when I was out shopping I met the deputy principal from Chloë’s primary school. She had, that very week, come across a letter I’d written back in 1977 about Chloë being absent from school. She’d kept it because it had made her laugh. Goodness knows which letter it was; I’d written so many for one reason or another. Chloë’s tenth grade maths teacher has a whole file of them, each attempting to be funnier than the last to distract his attention from her dismal performance and incomplete homework. It’s true I can’t live without writing. Every time the chance to write arises, whether it’s to the window cleaner about leaving the dogs in the back garden, not in the house, or to the lawyer about the proliferation of Possum Magic products and its ramifications, my aim is to enjoy myself. I love imagining the reader reading what I’ve written because, I suppose, I’ve had such terrific responses in the past. I just can’t resist messing around with writing.
I can’t not try because my sense of audience is so strong. It might result from having trained as an actress for three years in the Stanislavski tradition: I can see and hear my imagined readers very clearly. I can’t even sign a birthday greeting without going into battle with the blank side of the card. A feminist bookshop in Adelaide was having its fifth birthday so I signed a card but couldn’t seal it. I stood pondering in the post office. The bookshop is called “The Murphy Sisters”. What could I write? All I could think of was, “The boy stood on the burning deck…” The boy? For a feminist bookshop? Suddenly it came:
The girl stood on the burning deck
Her feet were full of blisters
She could not move-
Her head was in
A book from Murphy Sisters.
What does all this have to do with the teaching of writing? First, I wonder how often we demonstrate our crazy, private note writing to our students? It’s probably not much of an option in their lives because they don’t know that it’s possible, that such fun exists, and that it’s rewarding for its own sake, let alone for the glorious responses it creates. I’m wrong, of course. They do know. What about all those underground notes students write to each other in class? Why can’t we legitimize it? Wouldn’t it make our classrooms come alive if kids giggled and shrieked in the open about writing that was written in the open, instead of underground?
Second, isn’t it incredible how often writing means writing stories? I can’t stand writing stories. Honestly! I never write them from my imagination—only when an idea from life or books jumps into my head, not out of it. I have about four ideas a year and I’m a proficient, professional, published writer, yet we ask children to write story after story. What’s wrong with letters, for instance? Clarity and voice and power and control are much more easily developed through letter writing because, perhaps, the audience is so clearly defined and will, if all goes well, respond. Writing for fun is not just for fun—it’s for the long-term, conspicuous development of the craft itself.
Within the fun of writing there is also power. It seems to me that the most delicate transactions are best dealt with through a sort of self-effacing humor which makes one’s point without causing offence. But do we ever communicate the possibility of this kind of writing to our students so that they might become similarly empowered in their own lives? I shared the following letter with my students to demonstrate the kind of writing I have used beyond my schooling. It was to the architect of our home extensions, toward the end of the building project:
Dear Brian,
Here I am, home again, and eager to bring The Extension Situation to a close. The State Bank is satisfied with the work and will pay the builder as soon as we indicate in writing that we are similarly satisfied. A few things still require attention, however.
1. There are still no handles on the drawers in my office. This is, as you can imagine, an extreme hazard to my nails!
2. The toilet seat is so badly positioned that it will not stay up. I fear the intimate damage this may cause any male guest…
3. The bricks in the patio have not been replaced and, as it is unlikely that we shall excavate for buried treasure in the near future, I would like them replaced as soon as possible.
4. Although we do not see eye to eye with our neighbor (he is very short), I would be unhappy to see him killed by falling bricks when he leans over the fence to gasp in admiration at our extensions. The brick wall separating our properties could, at present, be pushed over by a child. The damage to the wall was caused during the initial excavations. Early rectification of this danger would be appreciated.
5. Otherwise the place is a perfection of taste and convenience—thank you! I love it. The State Bank mentioned that the builder was expecting all the rest of the money. I was puzzled because I understood that we would save approximately $2,000 by not having a retaining wall built. I have exquisitely good eyesight and search though I might, I cannot find a retaining wall! I hope that you can clarify this situation. I am a writer, not a mathematician.
With happy thanks, Mem Fox.
I am not at all surprised, considering the purpose of this letter that Mitchell and Taylor (1979) understand writing to be “a means of acting upon a receiver. Its success will be judged by the audience’s reaction: ‘good’ translates into ‘effective’, ‘bad’ into ‘ineffective’. Instead of a product, we are studying an interaction, a dynamic relationship with all the complexities that involves.” (p. 250) My letter to the architect was framed and now hangs upon his office wall among his diplomas. And the extensions were completed to our entire satisfaction. The letter was effective.
I’m anxious about the power or lack of it in school writing. Power is about being able to craft a piece of writing so effectively that its purpose is achieved. “Craft” means understanding the nature and importance of leads and endings; of showing, not telling; of sharpening and tightening; of structure and focus; of purpose and audience; and of the conventions. “Craft” means being able to put those understandings into practice. “Craft” means struggling in that battlefield between the brain and the hand until the best possible draft is achieved. Children won’t learn how to be powerful by writing identical letters to Mem Fox, as so often happens, alas. So depressing!
I use the power of my own writing regularly, to manipulate the world into granting my wishes. For example, I remember applying for and receiving vast funding to attend a conference in New Zealand at which I wasn’t even presenting a paper. The committee concerned had collapsed into unwilling giggles over my application and, hey presto, there was my air ticket! And best of all, in 1986 I jumped over five incremental steps in my promotion to Senior Lecturer, a feat so daring I wouldn’t have attempted it had I not had confidence in my own power to write a sufficiently stunning application.
Such power doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from practising writing for real reasons. It comes from having read powerful writing. It comes from having been taught, and I mean taught, the basic skills of spelling and punctuation in the context of real writing events. Those of us who write best have most power and therefore have most control over our lives. It seems to me to be a supreme arrogance on our part as teachers not to see that the granting of this power to our children is politically and socially essential. In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they’re powerless without those skills. Their power won’t come about without practice and the practice can’t come about without purpose. The hardest thing for me as a teacher is discovering purposes which will excite my students to such an extent that they’ll risk the trauma of the writing battle. It’s hard, but it mustn’t be impossible, for their sakes.
I haven’t given much thought to it yet, but I have more than a hunch that power in writing actually deteriorates the further ahead children travel in their schooling. Many of my teacher education students after twelve years at school come to me helpless and fearful as writers, detesting it in the main, believing that they can’t write because they have nothing to say because they haven’t cared about saying anything because it hasn’t mattered because there’s been no real investment for so long. How I wish we could change this situation. We must give power to our people.
Before I’m carried from this battlefield on a stretcher, let me rapidly summarize my notes. The insights I have as to why I write make me believe that as a teacher I must try to:
help students to care about writing by making it real
give my students opportunities for real responses from people they admire
create situations in which students always own the investment in their writing
be sensitive to the social nature of writing, and the vulnerability of writers
demonstrate and encourage writing for fun and huge enjoyment and power
respond after publication as well as before
help to develop powerful writing so that my students can control their own lives
In my last will and testament I’d like to leave you this theory: children develop language through interaction, not action. They learn to talk by talking to someone who responds. They must therefore learn to write by writing to someone who responds. It’s not a new theory, but it’s one I keep forgetting even though it’s so clear and simple. Please keep it somewhere safe.
I don’t mind if you, dear reader, forget most of what I have written in this chapter except for one phrase: “to ache with caring”. If we as teachers ache with caring it will, perhaps, be possible for us to create classroom communities within school communities in which writing matters because it’s done for real reasons by real writers who “ache with caring” for a real response.
My hope is that through the grimy windows of my particularity we’ve been able to peer into a more generalized world; that we can now move into that world as agents of change so that our students write more, write more often, write more effectively and with greater willingness and enjoyment. I wish we could change the world by creating powerful writers for forever instead of just indifferent writers for school.
References
Mitchell, R and Taylor, M, “The Integrating Perspective: An Audience/Response Model for Writing.” College English, 41 (1979).
Children’s Questions Answered
Question: Have you always been a writing sort of person?
Answer: Yes. I wrote a book about soil erosion when I was ten, although it was only six pages long; and I wrote another much longer book when I was seventeen. I used to like writing letters best of all, and long daily entries in my diaries. I wrote letters to lots of friends and relatives in Australia because I grew up a long way away in Africa.
Question: Where do your ideas come from?
Answer: Real life, books, memories and feelings of the deepest kind.
Question: How many books have you written?
Answer: About 45-46, I think, with a few repeats. (That’s in September 2021.) I sort of lost count after a while! A full list of my books appears in section on the website called ‘A List of all the Books.’
Question: Why don’t you stick to the same illustrator?
Answer: The publisher and editor choose the illustrator. I can have some say in that decision, but it’s best to leave the choice to them. Anyway, artists can pick and choose the books they want to illustrate. If they don’t like my stories I have to grin and bear it and find another clever person. Boo hoo! There isn’t much I can do about it. I can’t draw for nuts.
Question: What do editors want from an illustrator?
Answer: They look at the feelings in the story and then try to find an illustrator who can best express those feelings in their artwork.
Question: How do you work with your illustrators?
Answer: I don’t. I leave them alone. I let them get on with the pictures by themselves because their ideas are always more brilliant than mine could ever be.
Question: Where do your characters’ names come from?
Answer: Real life, such as friends and family, or workmates; or the phone book; or from my head.
Question: Have you won any book awards?
Answer: Not very many, sadly. Not enough! We all want to win, don’t we? That’s what Koala Lou is about. But I do know that awards for books are not as important as the number of copies a book sells: that’s what really tells you if you’re a loved and adored author, and happily, my books sell. Thank heaven for that!
Question: How long does it take to write a book?
Answer: From seven minutes for Tough Boris, to two years for Koala Lou, and seven years for The Goblin and the Empty Chair. Koala Lou is only 487 words. I re-wrote it and re-wrote it and re-wrote it for two whole years, can you imagine?
Question: Why do you have so many different publishers?
Answer: Because no one publisher likes everything I write. Also, different publishers have their own special ‘list’ and will only publish books that fit the feeling of that list. My major publishers are Omnibus/Scholastic, and Penguin, in Australia; and HMH, and Beach Lane Books in the USA.
Question: Have you always been a writing sort of person?
Answer: Yes. I wrote a book about soil erosion when I was ten, although it was only six pages long; and I wrote another much longer book when I was seventeen. I used to like writing letters best of all, and long daily entries in my diaries. I wrote letters to lots of friends and relatives in Australia because I grew up a long way away in Africa.
Question: What made you become a writer?
Answer: I was studying children’s literature as a mature-age student at university\, and I had to write a children’s story as an assignment. My story, Hush the Invisible Mouse, later turned into Possum Magic. After that I felt like a writer. Ideas for books kept popping up, so I carried on writing and writing and writing. I’m still writing in 2021.
Question: Do you write full time, or do you have another job?
Answer: Writing is my major activity. Most of the time these days ((2021) I’m a grandmother. I used to love travelling around the USA and Australia talking to parents and teachers and children about reading, writing, and teaching. I was a university lecturer/professor at Flinders University for 24 years until the end of 1996, teaching writing to people who were going to be teachers. I also taught them how to teach reading, writing, speaking and listening. I’m crazy about teaching. It’s much easier and, for me, much more instantly rewarding than writing because I love interacting with people and laughing a lot.
Question: Which was your first book?
Answer: Possum Magic, published in 1983.
Question: Of the books you have written which is your favourite?
Answer: I love them all, really, although the latest is usually my favourite.
Secretly I do have favourite, but if I told you what it was all the other books might burst into tears. (Well, just this once: it’s CAT DOG, my latest book, illustrated by Mark Teague.)
Question: Who is there in your family and what are their names?
Answer: I have a husband and we have one daughter, Chloë to whom Possum Magic is dedicated. She was born in 1971. She is a teacher of French in a girls’ high school and she’s also a well-being counsellor in the same school. She has a son who was born in 2010. He’s my favourite human being in the whole wide world. I also have a sister called Jan, who lives in Italy. Sadly, our other younger sister, Alison, died a few years ago.
Question: Was Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge really your father’s name?
Answer: Yes. And in the same book, Nancy is my mother’s name, and Alison Delacourt Cooper is a combination of my two sisters’ names.
Question: What is your life story?
Answer: I was born in Melbourne on March 5th, 1946. I grew up in Zimbabwe, where my parents were missionaries. From 1965-68 I went to drama school in England. In 1969 I married Malcolm Fox. We came to Adelaide, in South Australia, in January 1970, because my grandfather aged 90 was all alone. We have lived and worked here ever since. I became a writer in 1983 but I taught at Flinders University long after that because I loved teaching. I retired from the university when I was 50.
Question: What is your real name?
Answer: Aha! Mind your own business. I detest my real name! I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been ‘Mem’ since my early teens, so my real name doesn’t sound like the real me anymore. My dad used to call me Memzi, which I love.
Question: Are you writing anything at the moment?
Answer: Yes. I usually write three or four books at once. There are at least four more in the pipeline. I’ll be nearly 80 by the time they’re all published. Hah! Who said people have to retire?
Question: How should I go about getting a book published?
Answer: Type your story neatly, double-spaced on one side of each sheet of paper. Put a copyright sign beside your name like this © (option G on an Apple computer). Then ask a bookseller or a librarian to recommend suitable publishers, and to give you their addresses if possible, or else find the addresses in the back of already published books. Send off your story with a covering letter and wait to see what happens. Because the only thing you ever pay for (in getting a book published) is the cost of a postage stamp, there is no reason not to send off a manuscript, no matter what age you are. These days you can send it as an email attachment. The only problem is that you should have read hundreds and hundreds of books and poems before you start writing yourself: only reading teaches you how to write
Question: When you write for kids, do you only write picture books?
Answer: Yes, except for my autobiography: Memories, which is no longer available.
Question: Will you ever write a kids’ novel?
Answer: Probably not. My talent is writing picture books.
Question: Will you ever write an adult novel?
Answer: No, no! I’m not interested in writing for adults.
Question: How long does it take for a book to be published?
Answer: It varies wildly. For example, the first draft of Koala Lou was written in September 1983. It came out in October 1988.
Question: Do you enjoy writing picture books?
Answer: I am passionate about writing anything except picture books! When I’m writing them, I detest it almost every minute of the way, because I’m allowed so few words and it’s so easy to write badly! Writing them well means re-writing and re-writing. My hand gets tired. My brain gets tired. Even my bottom gets tired. I do it because I love it when kids say, ‘I really love your books, Mem Fox!’
Question: Where do you write and what do you use?
Answer: I write at the computer, unless it’s an early draft. I usually hand-write my early drafts at a different desk in the bedroom. I write with a 4B pencil (4B pencils are soft and stop your hand from hurting) and then I go to my office desk to type the later drafts on to the computer. I work in total silence because writing picture books is like creating music. I hear the words in my head. I read my drafts aloud, over and over again. If there’s a fly buzzing in the room I have to kill it. Sorry!
Question: Did you write all the stories you told on ABC television in Australia in the 1980’s?
Answer: No. Those stories were mostly fairy tales and folk tales from around the world. Only Possum Magic and Koala Lou were my own.
Question: What is your favourite picture book that you haven’t written yourself?
Answer: I have many but let me name four that immediately come to mind: John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, by Jenny Wagner, illus. by Ron Brooks; Owl Babies by Martin Waddell; The Very Best of Friends by Margaret Wild, illus. by Julie Vivas; and Monkey and Me, illus. by Emily Gravett.
Question: Which football team to you support?
Answer: None. I know absolutely zero about football, tennis, baseball, rugby, cricket, netball, tulip throwing, fence-leaping or cabbage kicking. Watching sport is not my thing. I prefer walking on the beach, gardening or reading
Question: Do you have any pets?
Answer: Yes, the cutest dog called Mitzi. We love pets. We once had three dogs and cat. We used to have old excitable little dog called Nellie-Belle. I have written a book about her, called: Nellie Belle, but we haven’t found an illustrator yet.
Question: Do you have any unfulfilled personal ambitions?
Answer: Not really. I’m content!
This is a portrait of me painted in 2004 by Henny van den Wildenberg for the Archibald Prize, the big annual Australian prize for portrait paintings in Australia.
I love it because I do speak with my hands.
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”!’
Why reading aloud to our children changes their entire life’s journey.
Thank you very much for that kind introduction and for the invitation to open this national conference of the National Education of Young Children. I’m honestly overwhelmed by the honour. I mean, why me?
Our daughter’s career has meant that we have become the main daytime carers of our grandson, Theo who is two and half. We are ecstatic to be caring for him, but exhausted, so half a day a week, on Tuesdays, Theo goes to child care. I can hardly bear to be parted from him so I‘m always a little early to pick him up. I stand at the door and wait as the carer finishes reading a story to the children. As I stand there listening I always think: three cheers for Catherine! She’s reading to the little lambs! Hurrah! Of course she’s reading to them. I wouldn’t have put my only grandchild in a childcare centre where reading aloud never happened. I checked that out before I checked him in, needless to say.
There are educators in positions of influence today who believe that reading aloud to children is a waste of time. Such a belief is not only foolish, it’s frightening and dangerous. Research around the world has proved that children who are read to regularly are better able to learn to read easily, happily and quickly. Listening to beloved stories again and again is a step on the road to literacy that cannot be ignored, no matter how gifted children might be, or how disadvantaged; no matter what grade a child is in, or how young or old; no matter which language children speak; no matter when they start school; no matter which country or city or town or suburb they live in; no matter how far behind they are in their schooling.
Reading aloud cultivates the essential enchanting engagement with books, stories, rhymes and songs that every child has to experience before the formal teaching of reading can begin. The books that children listen to provide the best possible words in the best possible places. They teach children the language they will need.
Learning language—learning how to speak—is the most important pre-reading skill of all. Learning how to talk clearly, with a wide, interesting vocabulary is far more important than anything else in preparing children to learn to read—much more important than learning the letters of the alphabet or letter/sound relationships. Put simply, children who can’t talk can’t learn to read. We have to teach them to talk first, and reading aloud to them is the best way of doing it.
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”!’
Adults tend to think that children find new or literary words difficult to understand. Children don’t find difficult words difficult: they easily guess their meanings in the context of the surrounding story. It’s like learning any language. I was recently in France and after a while I was able to understand most of what I heard, having been taught French at high school by a fearsome, old-fashioned teacher. But when I tried to speak French myself I found I couldn’t do it without a struggle. So although Theo understands ‘spindly’, it’s a word that he probably won’t use himself for some time, but he certainly understands it and it will be there in his head when he needs it.
Children also learn lots of new words, and ways of using them, when the story is finished and there’s a buzz of excited conversation about it. Chatting to children, having two-way, normal, adult-like conversations is incredibly important in developing their language. Question and answer conversations don’t do much for language development but free-range gossip about a book, if we allow children to lead the conversation, provides huge benefits. As soon as a story is read there is something to talk about: pictures, characters, plot, feelings, reminiscences, and so on. Stories tend to get tongues wagging, and wagging tongues mean language is developing, and if language is developing then those lucky children will be better able to learn to read quickly, happily and easily.
Reading to children not only teaches them thousands of words, it also helps to make the proper flow and grammar of language become familiar. Correct expectations are set up about what word might come next in a sentence; and what might happen on the next page; and how the story might end and so on. All of this guessing helps children to learn which word follows this word in that sentence, until finally they can confirm their guesses by looking at the print on the page. In other words being read to helps them in a profound way to learn to read. Here’s a message from a mother to prove my point:
My family loves your books and [we] own most of them… I find it interesting that even at an early age children recognise the pattern of a problem with resolution at the end. I brought home “Where is the green sheep?” one day and announced to my boys that I had purchased a new book called “Where is the green sheep?” My four year old said “Probably on the last page, but I want you to read it to us anyway.” Anna Starrett
Let me read you the book so you can see if he’s right. Read Where is The Green Sheep?
I don’t know if you noticed how short a book Green Sheep is, but it is short and that brings me to another point. Very often the books we choose to read to little kids are too long and involved for the age and stage that the children are at, so they fidget and we wrongly assume they don’t enjoy being read to. We need to read books to very young children that are as close as possible in length and style to the songs we sing them in early childhood. For example, let’s all sing this one…how many of you know it?
Three little monkeys
jumping on the bed;
one fell off
and bumped his head.
Mama called the doctor
and the doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
Two little monkeys
jumping on the bed;
one fell off
and bumped his head.
Mama called the doctor
and the doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
One little monkey
jumping on the bed;
one fell off
and bumped his head.
Mama called the doctor
and the doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
From that song to this book is one easy step: read ‘Two Little Monkeys.’ I didn’t choose to read Two Little Monkeys because it was about monkeys. That was just a happy circumstance. I chose to read that book because, like the song ‘Three Little Monkeys’, it is short and has rhyme, rhythm and repetition.
Dyslexics, who can barely learn to read, and others who find it difficult to learn to read often have a poor sense of rhythm and can’t hear simple rhymes such as ‘red and bed’ or ‘house and mouse’. So getting rhyme and rhythm into children’s heads at a young age is incredibly important to their success as future readers.
I’ve mentioned some of the educational advantages of reading to children but honestly the reason I adore reading aloud is because it’s fun! For me and for the children. Fun, fun, fun, people! I love it. I love to see little kids hanging on every word. I love to see them totally and unexpectedly silent, with their mouths open. I love it when they join in with noise and laughter. I loved it when they gasp, or groan, or grin. I particularly love it when I read a familiar, lilting story when children have been upset in some way, or been in trouble, or are just over-excited—a lovely sense of peace descends. Angry, upset children climb down off the walls and creep towards the story, if you will, so as to be wrapped in its safety and warmth. The story heals and soothes. The effect is almost miraculous.
Familiar stories also build communities because everyone in the group has the same book experiences; in-jokes develop that belong to that group alone; and certain words, original words, mad words, gorgeous words come to have special meaning in that class and only in that class. It’s like having a secret code that binds everyone together. Let me expand on the kind of jokes that can emerge. I’ll read this book first: Read Counting Goats.
When children know a story we can begin to play with the text in a way that makes them pay extra attention to what we’re saying and how it relates to the print on the page. Such as in Let’s Count Goats, when they have heard it many times, we could say:
Here we see a mountain goat frisking in the sun,
And here we see a city goat going for a run.
But can we count the beach goats? (I think there’s only one.)
The children, familiar with the story, will hear the wrong rhythm of ‘beach’ instead of ‘seaside’ and they’ll laugh and yell out: ‘No! No! Not beach! SEASIDE!” And we can always pretend that we can’t count so we get the numbers wrong. The children will yell out and correct us as if we were idiots. Oh heavens, it’s such fun! Find me a bunch of kids quickly! I can’t wait to read aloud again.
I keep talking about reading familiar stories, and the effect of loved stories. There’s not much point in reading a story once. I’m not sure why so many people seem so frightened of reading the same story over and over again but honestly, it’s essential. A story will only have an educational and emotional effect if it’s familiar, if the children know it so well that it becomes a favourite. And it can only become a favourite if it’s read again and again and again, especially on the day they hear it for the first time. On that day they should also hear it for a second and third time, so they’re eager to hear it for a fourth time the next morning.
Before I go on, let’s recap: we’re going to read aloud often. We’re going to read aloud for educational reasons, for emotional reasons, for community-building, and because it’s such good fun. We’re going to read the same stories over and over again. And the stories we are going to read to the very young are going to be short and filled with rhyme, or rhythm or repetition, or all three, like the songs we sing in early childhood. Such as this:
Shoo, fly, don’t bother me!
Shoo, fly, don’t bother me!
Shoo, fly, don’t bother me!
I don’t want your…
company!
We always sing songs in the same way. We don’t change the tempo and we don’t change the tune. And it should be the same with every story we read. We need to find our own tune and our own way of reading it and stick to that exact tune every time so the children can get to know it easily and remember it more quickly.
Another thing about songs is that they’re usually sung in a lively fashion. And so it should be when we read stories: liveliness is what it takes, not special training—just the same joy and smiley liveliness that we use when we sing. I’ve heard many a story told in such a manner that I’ve wondered why the reader bothers to read at all. We have to read as if it’s madly important, because it is. As we open a book we have to think: ‘Oh man, this is SO important! I must remember that! I have to do it well. I can’t just sit here and the mouth the words on the page like person walking through mud.’ We need a smile on our faces, a twinkle in our eyes—and liveliness!
With older children, when we move into real stories with less rhyme and rhythm and repetition, the thing that I look for most in a book is something that will change the emotional temperature of the children who are listening. They have to laugh or cry or be a little scared, or grossed out, or madly cheered up and excited. Something has to happen between the first word and the last page that changes them in some emotional way. And we need to be careful that it’s the children’s emotions that are changed. Too often we choose books that change our emotions without realising that children might not react in the same way. A story that moves adults might well leave children unmoved. The story has to appeal to the age group we are reading to.
I mentioned earlier that we have to read aloud as if it’s the most important thing in the world because so much hangs on the outcome for the children in our care. If anyone in this room feels at all inadequate about reading aloud I have a whole section on my website in which I read aloud a lesson in reading aloud. That same lesson appears as a chapter in this book: Reading Magic: why reading to our children will change their lives forever. Reading Magic also has lots of other hints about games you can play with stories and words that will make education and literacy happen without any teaching. I’ll just repeat that: the hints I have provided will make education and literacy happen without any teaching. Well, almost. You’ll have to flick though the book to get what I mean!
One of the reasons we are reading to children is so they can get to know us and we can get to know them, so we can bond and form a close-knit kind of family group. This will only happen if there’s real human communication between the children and us—a two-way process through which children learn how to talk, so it’s incredibly important to keep a real conversation going. Using technology to provide stories wrecks that bonding because the live adult is removed from the situation. I’ve had to put my books on PowerPoint today because the audience is so large that I’ve had no choice. You have communicated with a screen, not me, when I have been reading, and it’s broken my heart.
But in case you do want examples of reading aloud there are many on YouTube to choose from. My publishers have made a beautiful video of this book: Hello Baby. I was tempted to show it to you but I have decided to do the very opposite: to read it as I hope you will read books to your children, without a single screen in sight, even though you can’t see it from where you are, so you can feel the humanising difference between having technology and no technology. Similarly in Green Sheep I use the book like this: ‘Here is the up sheep and here is the down sheep… Here is the near sheep and here is the far sheep….’ I can’t have that lovely connection with my audience if I am using a screen of any kind.
Well that’s it, ladies and gentlemen. It must be obvious by now that I am begging you to read aloud to the children in your lives, your care and your classrooms so they have the best possible start in life, the smoothest possible path to reading, and the greatest opportunities available when they grow up. I want our children to travel the short road to happiness, not the long road to failure. Don’t we all?
Thanks so much for listening. I know the children who listen to you as you read aloud to them will bless you for the rest of their lives.
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.
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.
Four more reasons:
we want to positively affect children’s hearts
we want to positively affect children’s brains
we want to positively affect children’s words
we want to positively affect children’s futures
Their hearts: our first aim is merely to love spending time with our children, making them happy, and engaging in a ‘getting to know and love you’ interaction. It’s our chief aim every time we read a book to a child no matter if that child is a baby or a ten-year old. Tell the bonding and bikies story. [‘It’s the best way of bonding, isn’t it?’] Read Time for Bed.
When parents read to their children everyone’s in a good mood, in a good space, laughing over the things they’re seeing and hearing, chatting about what’s in the pictures and the story, repeating the same rhythmic, rhyming words again and again, with everyone falling in love with one or two particular books that the baby wants over and over and over and over again—books that make her eyes light up, and make her happy, books that he reaches out for, books that gladden his heart. By the time these read-to children start school they’re well on the way to good psychological health, fabulous language development, pleasing success in the classroom, and being good citizens when they grow up.
So our main reason for reading to our babies and young children, apart from the hilarious joy of it, is to show that we love them by taking time out of our busy lives to focus on them and them alone for a tiny ten minutes a day, to surround them with loads of love and absolute security, with giggling and happiness and laughter, in a serene space which says to the child: ‘Sweetheart, at this moment, in this day, in this place, you are dearly loved and you are completely safe.’ Read Megan’s letter:
I have just finished reading your ‘Reading Magic’. It gives me a great sense of peace to know that I gave my child the most enriched and valuable life as I possibly could. From when my son was 4 months I read to him for at least half an hour each day, several times a day. By the time he was 9 months he would retreat with his books and ‘read’, during times of stress or when he needed a break we would find him sitting in the middle of a pile of books absorbed in their stories. By the age of 10 months he knew all his animal sounds and had favourite books. He had many experiences which we would discuss before he went to bed. Just a few months ago, shortly after his second birthday he tragically died of Meningitis. I read to him while he was (unbeknownst to me or the medical team) slowly dying, sang to him when it was time for the machines to be turned off and now hold precious those books he loved. Above all I know that even though it was a short life it was filled with love, because of the time we spent together over books I showed him the world and the love that surrounded him. His little sister now loves to read with me also, at ten months of age she selects her favourite books and skids along on top of them over to me to be cuddled up with and read to. My son particularly enjoyed your Time For Bed. I just wanted to email you to say thankyou for writing your book Reading Magic as it has allowed me to see that as a mother I showed love to my son and was the best I could be and gave him the best and most enjoyable life even though it was short. Yours sincerely Megan von Brix.
Some of the children we know and live with, through no fault of their own, live in houses with people who don’t love them, with people who might hurt them. There is no routine safety or certainty in their turbulent existence, and they wonder why the sunshine of happiness is so often blocked from their view. But when we take the time to read to them, in that quiet, magic, story-sharing moment, all’s right with the world, and safety and love are restored, at least for a while. Read: Ten Little Fingers.
So! Reading aloud to children is first of all about making them happy. They’ll be falling in love with us at the same time as they’re falling in love with books, at the same time as we’re falling totally in love with them.
Now what about their brains? During a read-aloud session brains expand rapidly. Explain why: only 25% brain exists at birth, stimulation makes the brain grow, first year of life is of utmost importance, etc., etc.
Now if I knew that I could make my child clever at the same time as I was making him happy I wouldn’t hesitate to read aloud, would you? I mean who wants a dumb kid who’s always whining and whingeing and obnoxious? I’m stunned that some people don’t make time to read to their children even when they know and understand that sharing a story book with their little treasures will help them to be both happy and pleasant, and clever and pleased with themselves.
Read Green Sheep. Focus on FIRST YEAR OF LIFE. Talk about the worry of people being scared to wreck the book: that’s what it’s for. It’s useless wrapped in tissue paper at the bottom of a drawer or on a high shelf or at the back of a wardrobe! [Mention board books: their size and their hardiness.]
So now we have dealt with the hearts and the brains. How about their words?
Their words: It is more important for children to learn to talk well than it is for them to recognise letters before they start school. Children who talk well and clearly, with an interesting and wide vocabulary, learn to read very easily. This is because they’ve been read to so often they’ve probably heard a thousand stories at least, in their first five years. As a result of all this hearing of words they will have learnt many words themselves and will use them in cute ways: [football boy story: Mum you’re in the minority]. They will also have learnt from all the books I have read so far which words rhyme with what. Children who can’t hear rhyme by the time they are four find learning to read very difficult. Dyslexic children are known to have very little sense of rhythm and no ability to recognise rhyme. Yet we know that children who can recite six rhymes by heart by the time they are four are always in the top reading group by the time they are eight. Read Goodnight Sleep Tight.
How do little children learn words from having been read to? It’s not only from the actual words in the book—such a ‘mischievous’ in the Magic Hat and ‘eiderdown’ in Ten Little Fingers—but also from the extended sentences and energetic interaction and chat that we have with them over the things in the pictures and the things on the page. Even people who can’t read or can’t read very well can still pore over the pictures and talk in adult language about what’s on the page, sharing opinions and comments back and forth with the child who’s next to them on the floor or on the couch or the bed.
Speech pathologists despair when children come to them unable to speak at the age of four because in the houses they live in the tv has been on all day all of their of their lives, and no real conversation has ever happened between the parents of these children and their offspring, only instructions. Reading to a child provides endless opportunities for adult talk and meaningful conversation. Read Whoever You Are and demonstrate the chat.
Let’s re-cap for a moment: Why are we reading to children? For fun! And for their hearts, their brains, their words! And also their futures!
Let’s turn now to their futures: children who are not read to tend to find many aspects of life a little more difficult than children who are read to: school is difficult; jobs are more difficult to find and difficult to keep; choices of jobs are limited; good health, amazingly, is difficult to maintain in people who can’t read about health and heed the warnings and advice; self-esteem is sometimes difficult to find and hard to hang on to; a sense of peace as loved a human being is often disturbed and disrupted; and altogether they have a little less serenity in their lives because reading is such a huge part of our lives and if they can’t do it they’re sort of stuffed, though no fault of their own.
For me as an ex-teacher of teachers the thing I want most of all is for children to be happy at school; and successful children are happier than unsuccessful children and reading them helps to make them successful. Why wouldn’t we do it? Who wouldn’t want to feel the love in this story, for example, and change a child’s future for the better at the same time? Read Koala Lou.
If you own any of my books already, and if they are personally signed, I do hope you are not treating them carefully by putting them away on a shelf too high for a child to reach, or wrapping them up and hiding them away at the back of a cupboard. Books are there to be read and wrecked, and loved and pored over. They’re useless unless they’re in kids’ hands and hearts.
In your homes and or the fun-filled play groups you may belong to, or the pre-schools your children attend, and of course in their schools, here’s hoping that books and stories and talking and laughter will always play a part. In this way the hearts, the brains, the words and the futures of little children everywhere will live happily ever after.
Ten read-aloud commandments
Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. From birth!
Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. From birth!
Read at least three stories a day: it may be the same story three times. Children need to hear a thousand stories before they can begin to learn to read. Or the same story a thousand times!
Read aloud with animation. Listen to your own voice and don’t be dull, or flat, or boring. Hang loose and be loud, have fun and laugh a lot.
Read with joy and enjoyment: real enjoyment for yourself and great joy for the listeners
Read the stories that your child loves, over and over, and over again, and always read in the same ‘tune’ for each book: i.e. with the same intonations and volume and speed, on each page, each time.
Let children hear lots of language by talking to them constantly about the pictures, or anything else connected to the book; or sing any old song that you can remember; or say nursery rhymes in a bouncy way; or be noisy together doing clapping games
Look for rhyme, rhythm or repetition in books for young children, and make sure the books are really short.
Play games with the things that you and the child can see on the page, such as letting kids finish rhymes, and finding the letters that start the child’s name and yours, remembering that it’s never work, it’s always a fabulous game.
Never ever teach reading, or get tense around books.
Please read aloud every day because you just adore being with your child, not because it’s the right thing to do.