READING TO CHILDREN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 18

READING TO CHILDREN

(By MRS. ABBIE HARGRAVE.) “Well, my .dear, of course Tony won’t bother with learning to read to himself if you are always reading aloud to him ” This remark, made in my hearing the other day, started me on a train of thought. Tony, by the way, who was, according to his father, “backward and lazy,” was well under seven! Yet, so far as it went, that was a perfectly sound observation. Children who are frequently read aloud to, have undoubtedly a tendency to be slow in mastering the difficult task of reading. The fluency of their elders does not inspire them to emulation, and there does seem an unconscious slyness about them that shirks the effort to read for themselves when it might conceivably cut them off from the pleasure of listening to the reading of an adult. DULL TEXT BOOKS Imaginations well-fed and ears trained early to beauty, undoubtedly find a flatness about the adventures of "The Cat on the Mat” and “Ned” on his immemorial “Nag.” All this, I maintain, doesn’t matter in the least. Often enough if the child is encouraged to look at the printed page while it is being read to him, quite suddenly it will be found that he can read—with very little pi'eliminary drudgery. What matters is that early training of the ear in beauty—the rhythm, the colour, the fine shades of language. It is a theory of mine that you can’t start that too soon, or take it too seriously. Children’s books are for children—naturally. To “read down” to them, however, is to starve their minds as much as a diet of all “soft food” would starve their growing bodies. I have known a baby, who could barely talk, rest happy and contented to the music of Shelley’s “Cloud,” and again and again demand its repetition. Of course, he couldn’t understand it! But it showed him. dimly, something that he apprehended as lovely; and, for the moment, that was enough. POETRY’S APPEAL Poetry is easy to read (if you Iwe it), because of its perfection and it appeals to the unspoilt ear with surprising surety. A child who nas neard the best of it, perhaps, many times before he is of an age to read it for himself, is almost certain to return to it later with a taste readymade. Like everything else, good taste in reading is greatly a matter of first impressions. That is where a mother can help her children long before schoolmasters and mistresses get to work on them. Mothers of older children who complain that they never read anything but a magazine, and carrn t amuse themselves indoors for a single evening, are often very much to blame for this. The key to a great world of Romance was theirs, but they didn’t pass it on during the plascic, the impressionable. early years They let other things, trifling things, intervene —and then it was too late.