Inspiring Children to Read and Write for Pleasure

Using Literature to Inspire Literacy learning for Ages 8-12

Fred Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136926372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"A marvellous book of great practical value" – James Carter

The lack of interest in reading for pleasure amongst large numbers of primary age pupils, put off by 'mechanical' worksheet-driven approaches, is a cause for major concern amongst education professionals and parents. However, Inspiring Children to Read and Write for Pleasure from writer, journalist and education commentator Fred Sedgwick uses the context of literature to illuminate and inform the teaching of literacy in the primary classroom and inspire children to a love of books.

Aimed at Year 4, 5 and 6 primary pupils, but also significant as a transitions text to teaching secondary school pupils, this book shows how children's fluency in language - their thinking, their talking, their reading, their listening and their writing – can be greatly improved and enriched through contact with literature placed in an understandable context. With both focus on prose and poetry, primary pupils will be introduced to using grammar, syntax and sentence construction skills in meaningful contexts. Through the use of inspiring case studies, schedules of work and practical classroom applications as well as literary figures like Dickens, Coleridge, Carroll, Rossetti and Shakespeare, primary school children can enjoy reading and writing again.

With a number of sample passages to use, teaching guidelines and examples of children's work, this book will be of great interest to literacy coordinators, practicing Primary PGCE and Key Stage 2 teachers and those on BA Primary/B'Ed courses.

Part I
Prose

Introduction

I think … indeed, I am almost sure … but memory is a notoriously deceitful witness … that I could read by the time I started infant school. Most teachers would probably say the same. Indeed, one problem that besets the teaching of reading, especially to reluctant readers, is that hardly any teacher has ever been in that poor, word-frightened child’s predicament when he or she is ordered to stare at small black shapes on white paper and to try to decode them.

Those of us who became literate early must try to imagine it. You are 7 years old, and you are ordered to convert these meaningless shapes to common sense in an atmosphere that suggests that doing this is the most important thing in the world. It is, in a sense, you are led to believe, a life and death matter, because you’ll get nowhere in life if you can’t read. But these shapes mean nothing to you, especially when compared with that football that you were belting around that playground ten minutes ago; they mean nothing to you compared to those maggots in the tin when you go with your big brothers to fish in the reservoir at the weekend; they mean nothing to you compared with your ballet lesson, or your birthday party tonight. And yet this big person, sitting beside you in a corridor, is insisting that you have a go. What will happen if I can’t do it? you wonder.

We understand this child no more than the nurse at my doctors’ practice who has just weaned me off smoking understands the attraction of smoking. She has never sucked on the weed, never gone to bed and been unable to sleep because there was no small cigar in the flat to accompany the morning cup of tea. She has never faced the predicament of the addict with his ludicrous, killing habit. You could say, perhaps, that we need to recruit anti-smoking nurses who have puffed their sixty-a-day and packed it in; and, by the same token, we need to recruit teachers who struggled with print when they were little, and who learnt to love print later. Both tall orders, of course.

Even though I was, at 5 years old, a tyro reader, I was ‘put on’ (what an odd metaphor is embedded in that phrase! – I must follow it up some time) a reading scheme (Blue Book, Red Book, Green Book, Yellow Book – you know, or can imagine, the kind of thing) and many of the stories that the writers of that scheme published have stayed with me my whole life through. There was the Dutch boy who saved his village from flooding by putting his finger in the dyke; there was Helen Keller and her heroic conquering of her blindness and deafness; and there was Offero who unknowingly carried the Christ child across a stormy river, and who became, as a result, Christoffero and, subsequently, Christopher. That scheme was published in hardback, and that fact, for me, already an infant bibliophile, was part of their charm. Real Books! And I have remembered each of these stories, and I use them with children. Boys called Christopher are thrilled by the last one.

My discovery of the power of the story, like many people’s, had had a more intimate beginning: bedtime. ‘Talking in Bed’ is an emblem, of course, of ‘two people being honest’, as Larkin put it in his poem with that title (Larkin 1988). Well, that is true in the way Larkin meant: lovers are naked with each other in bed more ways than one, or they should be; but it is also true of parent and child. Most parents instinctively understand the multi-faceted value of conversation at this time: it’s calming, as I have said; it is a bond between parent and child; it is a chance to give and receive pleasure; it is (if any parents want to see the matter in such a cold light) a cornerstone for the child’s learning of language; and it is a chance for any bad times during the day to be absolved. It has a sacramental quality. It is a chance to be honest.

That was where it all started. But I suppose now that those Wide Range Readers (that’s what that reading scheme was called! I suddenly remember) made it clear to me that those stories were public; were, potentially at least, in everyone’s possession. They were public possessions that we, as members of the human race, shared; stories that were evidence, in fact, of our common humanity.

And later at Sunday School there were Bible stories. I want to stress here the word ‘story’ rather than the word ‘Bible’. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, David and Jonathan and the rest were all part of a store of myths that educated people from a Judaeo-Christian background would have known, as much as a previous generation, at least the parts of it educated in public schools, would have known the classical myths – and even my generation, or some of it, and not in public schools, heard about Odysseus and Polyphemus on the classroom radio. It is a truism to say that these stories are no longer significant to children’s lives, and the only two Bible stories that nearly everybody knows something about are Noah’s Ark and the narrative of the birth of Christ in St Luke’s Gospel – and the second is always tinselled up out of all recognition.

They have their own stories now, of course, many generated by media that is largely closed to some of us. But tell them one of the stories listed above with expertise and enthusiasm, and you will give the lie to any notion that children no longer respond to the old media: the human voice accompanied by nothing except, possibly, the illustrations in a book. Or read – or better still tell from memory – the stories in Oscar Wilde’s book The Happy Prince and Other Stories. The ending of one of them will leave almost any child open-eyed, slack-jawed and, more to the point, thinking: ‘And they found the giant lying dead under the tree all covered with white blossom’.

Members of the human race have told, and have listened to (and then, at a late stage, written down and read) stories since who knows when. These stories may have had many purposes: to lull a baby gently into sleep; to entertain relatives; to cause laughter and tears; to exhort to a greater effort in battle; but, more importantly, while they were functioning in all these ways, they often helped (whether this was intended or not) both the teller and the listener to understand, and therefore to deal with, some predicament: love, impending but uncertain; love departing; or a battle lost, or a battle to come. Or death.

To call the stories told in the early chapters of Genesis ‘myths’ is not to call them falsehoods, and therefore it is not to diminish their status, not to belittle them. And to say that they are ‘unhistorical’ or ‘unscientific’ is beside the point. They are something other than chronological accounts, or scientific treatises. They deal with humankind’s relationship with, to begin with, the void that we assume must have been there before human existence, and which is there before we are born and, possibly, after we die; they deal with the natural environment and our relationship with it; they deal with ignorance (and the other side of that coin, innocence); with sexual love; with knowledge; guilt; with creativity; with how God walks in the garden in the cool of the day.

To take the point of the environment, it has been noted before, but it is still ignored by fundamentalists, that the order of the creation of the world is quite different in the two accounts. The first (Chapter 2:4a) has something like: light, herbs and grass, fruit, sun, moon, stars, animals, man, woman; and the second (the rest of Chapter 2) has: man, plants, rivers, animals, woman. The two accounts were made for different purposes, but neither is intended as a historical or a scientific account. They are theological documents.

I wrote earlier how stories help us confront realities. ‘Red Riding Hood’ deals with the danger that potentially surrounds all children, and so does ‘Goldilocks’. That wolf stands for all the child-murderers (and childabusers) throughout time. A modern story like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are deals with temper tantrums in what still seems to be, after all the years since it was published, an original way. The Oscar Wilde story that I mentioned earlier deals with innocence, selfishness, repentance and death among other things, and yet it is open to 7-year-old children

To tell a story is a uniquely human activity. Dogs do not send their young to sleep with picture books, or gather round in bars to swap jokes, or gossip about neighbours. Neither do they read stories in newspapers, or value novels. Orang-Utans, those more civilised of apes, suffer and rejoice, but they do not write stories or tell them to each other, or sing happy or sad songs.

How to wreck the story-writing impulse

Stories told, listened to, written down and read are vital to human emotional, spiritual and intellectual development. So the thought that a child might be about to write one must be exciting. But much schooling does its utmost to drain the activity of all pleasure. It is easy to do this, and it is a day-to-day activity in many schools. A notice on a hundred primary school classroom walls proclaims (or it did until recently):

Here are some ways of beginning a story

Once upon a time there was

It was a dark and stormy night

In a country long ago and far away

There was once a handsome prince

All of these are clichés, and the cliché is the enemy of all good writing. The novelist Martin Amis made this point with characteristic force when he called his 2001 book of literary criticism The War Against Cliché. Few readers will notice every cliché on a page (some will, though), but they have a deadening effect nevertheless. But, even more importantly, a writer only uses a cliché when the brain is not engaged. So as teachers we have to ask what learning is going on when a child writes an opening to the story in any of the ways suggested above, when, of course, they are not only using a cliché but one handed thoughtlessly down to them. One might say that no thought is required: in fact, thought is being actively discouraged.

To make children aware of this problem, I composed the beginning of a story with a class of Year 6 children that was, as far as we could make it, entirely composed of clichés. They had to be, I made it clear, not just phrase-clichés like ‘long ago and far away’, but also situation-clichés like ‘his father was a harsh and cruel man’.

It was a dark and stormy night in a strange country long ago and far away. A handsome prince lived in a fine castle with his father and a hundred servants. His mother had died just after he was born, and his father was a harsh and cruel man w...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Prose
• Part II Poetry
• The voice of anonymous: poems from the oral tradition
• Writing to explore: poems from the written tradition
• Notes
• References
• Index