Reading: Authors
Mem Fox, A Young
Reader's Champion
Parents of newborns and toddlers should get to know Australian
children's author and literacy star Mem Fox, and spend some time on her outstanding
website, www.memfox.com.
Although she's famous for her 35 or
so books, including Possum Magic -
the best-selling picture book ever in Australia, with over 4 million books sold
worldwide - and other favorites such as Wilfrid
Gordon McDonald Partridge and Time
For Bed, which Oprah Winfrey calls one of the best children's books of all
time, her real passion is helping parents and teachers with installing and
inspiring literacy in young children.
She has some of the most
common-sense, positive, encouraging content you can imagine to help parents
bring their young children to early literacy - early reading - so that they can
be off to the races in school as well as life.
One of her main suggestions is that
parents are really skimping on the amount of time they spend reading to their
children. One 5-minute short book at bedtime, even if you keep up that habit
every night, is just not enough.
This beloved author is recommending
more like a half-hour or an hour a day.
If that's too much for bedtime, you can always break
it up into two or three reading sessions per day, or keep things totally
spontaneous. But a rule of thumb of 30 to 60 minutes a day with the child's
eyeballs fixed on a book is probably the wisest course of action.
How many parents live up to that? Very few! And it
shows, with declining literacy rates in the early grades in school, burdening
primary-level teachers more than we ever used to.
But Mem Fox is determined to fix
that. She was a college professor - a teacher of teachers - for many years, and
wants nothing more than for them to be able to spend more time teaching because
their students are already good readers.
Consider this excerpt from her website's section, "If
I Were Queen of the World":
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"It seems to me that those of us who
are parents and carers can and should be encouraged to play a key role in the
development of literacy. After all, we have the great advantage of having fewer
children in our families than teachers have in their classes and are therefore
able to have valuable one-to-one fun with our offspring, through the medium of
books. Having fun with books, which means absolutely loving books and all they
have to offer, is an essential pre-requisite to learning to read.
"So please, I beg you all to read superb books aloud
to your children! Begin on the day they are born. I am very serious about this:
at least three stories and five nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only
at bedtime, either. Read with passion and expressive abandon, maintaining the
same variety in your voice at exactly the same place in the story or rhyme
every time, keeping the same louds and softs, the same highs and lows, the same
fasts and slows. In this manner your children will begin to remember the words
by remembering the 'tune' of your reading. Memorising a rhyme or story and
turning the pages at the right time is an important step in learning to read
and should never be discounted as cheating. Fill their minds with a torrent of
wonderful words, familiar and unfamiliar, common and grand, basic and lofty.
And always make it a wild and joyful experience.
"If a borrowed story book or
nursery-rhyme book becomes favourite, do your utmost to purchase it for your
child. Children who have lived in book-filled homes prior to going to school
are known to be scholastically advantaged for the rest of their lives. And
children who have memorised eight nursery rhymes by the age of three, so I have
been told, are always the best readers by the age of eight.
"As children become more and more
familiar with a book, play games which focus on individual words and letters,
such as covering repetitive or rhyming words with your fingers and letting the
child guess which word might be underneath. Make it harder and harder—but keep
'fun' uppermost in your mind—by asking what letter the hidden word might start
with. Or you might choose common words like and or the and find them on every
page yourself, pointing them out to the child with squeals of excitement at
each new discovery; then let the child find them, as a game, always as 'fun'.
Write the words on a piece of paper in a sentence that has meaning to the
child: e.g 'Chloë loves the beach and Nana,' and stick it on the fridge.
"Provide a variety of writing
materials: different thicknesses of pen and crayon and pencil, scraps of
computer paper, tiny notebooks, real exercise books, and coloured paper and
leave them lying around so that children can draw, or draw/write, or pretend to
write, or really write anything from notices for their bedroom doors, to
shopping lists, letters to grandparents, complaints to parents, requests to
Santa, and so on. It is tremendously important for the recognition of letters,
and the relationship of those letters to sounds, that children should grapple
with their own print as early as possible. Reading and writing go hand in hand:
each depends upon, and improves the other, in a cycle of development."
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Can't you just sense her encouragement
and passion?
She didn't feel too positively about her given name,
Merrion Frances, and so she has been "Mem" since age 13. Born in Australia, she
grew up in Africa, where her parents were Christian missionaries. She studied
drama in England, and returned to Adelaide, Australia in 1970, where she has
lived with her husband, Malcolm, a teacher, ever after. They have one grown
daughter.
