Guiding Question: How do literature and media help children and youths learn, grow, and connect to the world?
It’s said over and over and over again that children who read “do better”. What that means in the long term, I’m not sure, but what I can attest to as a reader and as someone who has spent this summer reading more children’s literature is that reading is most certainly a doorway into other realms and into other minds. We are given characters to connect with and stories that we can’t always experience on our own simply by living. The written word gives us descriptions of places and people and we must use our own heads to imagine what’s going on.
I think it’s important to understand that this the multiple universes of every book we pick up, and that it isn’t something that comes natural or easily. Storytelling is built into culture the way needing to eat is built into our culture on some levels – but reading and writing is not. Reading and writing are human inventions that promote creativity and gives storytelling a different medium. Reading is something that needs to be taught to a certain extent. The joy one gets from picking up a book a reading it stems from the emotional connection one has to the act of reading.
One of the reasons I read is that I can remember my mother and father reading to me when I was younger. In those stories I remember having a certain fear that the main characters were getting themselves into trouble they wouldn’t be able to get out of, but also a knowledge that they would make it because Mum and Dad were there, and that would make it okay.
That understanding of risk taking, and using the world of books to take some of those risks I think is very important. However, in order to do that, we have to write everything for children. We have to give them the space to find what interests them, find those books that hit the closest home and those that reach into those worlds that they most want to explore. Young Adult fiction works very well for this because there are so many books out there that already do that – but what about for individuals who aren’t at quite as high a reading level? There are artistic books out there that do tackle some of the harder topics. I’ve been learning that over the last few weeks.
I’ve also learned just how important it is to look at all these books again as an adult. There is so much that we miss because we are not adults. While adults write these books for children, they have a context of a grown adult when thinking about what they are writing, and things that children miss litter the fictional world. The books of my childhood that I remember the most clearly and understand the best are the ones that I’ve come back to again and again. The context may not be easily understood in the beginning, but because I kept coming back to them, I don’t remember not understanding the book in its entirety. But those I did not were full of surprises.
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key had a lot of self discovery re-reading it. I had to read it in sixth grade, but all I could remember of it was the feeling of needing to stop Joey from doing certain things and the bloody scenes were knives and pencil sharpeners and scissors were involved. Reading it as an adult, it brought a lot more of the truth of the story to the front. It’s hard for us to know as adults what will sink in to our students minds, but we do our best to give them the information they will need however we can. At the same time, we need to remember that we are no longer children ouselves and that our persective is going to be different.