Book Review/Reading Magic
Reading Magic
Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever
By Mem Fox
Harcourt Books
Paperback $12
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
If Mem Fox has her way, all children will be reading before they enter school. How? By being read to. It not only sounds simple, it is and Mem Fox has become an international expert on reading. In her newly updated and revised edition of “Reading Magic,” she tells how reading aloud to children even in infancy will make readers of them before they enter formal schooling.
Fox is Australian. She didn’t even become a university student until she was in her early 30s. “This set me, totally unaware, on the road to fame and fortune since it was during that course that I wrote the first draft of my first book,” she said. It was a children’s book titled “Possum Magic.” The book she said was rejected by publishers nine times over a five year period but went on to become the best selling children’s book in Australia, with over two million copies sold.
The book was first introduced into the United States in 1987 and became equally popular here. Since “Possum Magic,” she has written 28 books for children.
“Literacy has become the great focus in my life. It is my passion, my battle and my mission and my exhaustion,” she said. Her book, “Reading Magic,” is how a child can learn to read before school. “Writing is my second love,” she confesses. “My first is teaching, to which I admit an addiction so powerful that I’m surprised I had the courage to retire in 1996 at age 50, as an associate professor of literacy studies at Flinders University in South Australia where I had been for 24 years.” Her retirement, led her to spend more time urging parents, teachers and others to read aloud to children from birth to five years old. She now travels the world doing it as an internationally respected literacy expert.
“It’s hard to find time to really talk to our children,” she wrote. “I emphasize to busy fathers as well as busy mothers, the importance of reading aloud between a parent and a child. It is one of the most important gifts you can give a child.”
She said no matter how much children are loved by grandparents, nannies and others, “the love children crave is the love of their parents.” As little time as 15 minutes a day is a wonderful gift to a child, she emphasized.
On boys and reading, she said the secret is to get them young. “We need to mesmerize baby boys in the first months of their lives with rhyme and repetition by reading aloud to them as infants,” she wrote. Poetry, she said, is one of the best ways to achieve this. “Many people think children
will dislike poetry, but that is far from the truth,” explaining that poetry gets a bad name from adults whose opinions are colored by horrible high school memories.
Speaking of television, she said. it is important to remember that neither television nor the Internet will go away, so it is better to control the times children spend watching television or using the Internet rather than banishing them. She also takes on the reading controversy over phonics, saying, “English is a wickedly confusion language since so many words look exactly the same, but have different pronunciations and meanings. Phonics also doesn’t take into account the different English accents.”
She tells the story of a book signing she did in the American South when a book buyer asked to inscribe the book to a person named “Tara.” She misheard the name because of the Southern accent and inscribed the book to “Terror.”
Fox praised an American expert on reading aloud to children and dedicated her book to Jim Trelease, the author of “The Read-Aloud Handbook,” a classic among teachers and librarians in the United States.
She concludes the book, which she so enthusiastically wrote by telling the reader that she hopes they have come to believe that reading aloud cures everything from warts to global warming, but advises the reader not to take her word for it, but to find the nearest child and “discover it for yourself.”
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
Mem Fox’s Ten Read Aloud Commandments
- Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud.
- 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.
- 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 the kids love, over and over and over again, and always read in the same tone for each book: i.e. with the same intonations 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, mums and dads, because you just love being with your child, not because it’s the right thing to do.