Children instinctively love books. Especially colourful, exciting ones. I heard a story recently of a little boy in KwaZulu-Natal who cried so when the project that he was part of stopped handing out books for them to take home, that his grandmother took some of her pension money to go and buy him one.
Children instinctively love books. Especially colourful, exciting ones. I heard a story recently of a little boy in KwaZulu-Natal who cried so when the project that he was part of stopped handing out books for them to take home, that his grandmother took some of her pension money to go and buy him one.
A friend of mine, who is doing research in some Grade 3 classes in Grahamstown, recently took a few small, bright books into a classroom. She found all the children’s eyes drawn like magnets to that which she had under her arm as she walked into the room.
A YouTube video about Babies enjoying Books shows a six-month-old baby sitting on his mother’s lap, gurgling and laughing every time his mom turned the page of the little cardboard book and pointed out an object and its name.
The problem is there aren’t enough books around and they aren’t cheaply available. It should be within the reach of every home and every school to obtain books – we should be flooding our children’s environments with them.
That being said, it is of course possible to make your own books, using colourful pictures cut out from magazines, newspapers and advertising leaflets, or drawings of your own. As long as it’s something where you can create the excitement of seeing what’s on the next page and have a good story to go with it, children will be interested.
Next week on the Ukufunda resources page we will feature an example of how to fold an A4 page into a little book.
If cell phones are ubiquitous and every second person, including children, has one, I don’t see why we can’t do the same with books. We just need to make reading cool. And I don’t think it’s that hard to do – all we need to do is build on the natural curiosity of children, their love of a good story and the magic of colourful, interesting images.
Instead we kill it by not having these kinds of books around and exposing children for the first time to reading when they go to school and have to put up with boring readers.
