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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.

 

 

 

 

            By Susan Darst Williams www.AfterSchoolTreats.com Reading © 2010

 

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