As a parent, do you visit the Kindle Store looking for fun books to read with your children? What categories do you look under?
As a parent, just being with your child around a book seems out of place in our busy lives. And what a difference it seems when you imagine having fun and doing the serious work of parenting to support children’s reading skills.
Helping parents to be with kids
Regardless, it’s important to keep in mind what parents hope for when they read a book with their child. Like the mum in the image, mothers and fathers just want to share ‘what do you love’ with their child.
How does any parent grab such joyful moments? What help do single mums or dads need to find delightful reading experiences?
The image reminds us it’s possible. Clare found it of her mum. Moments, like the one in the old photo, helped inspire her to write the Young Philosopher Series short books. As an author of children’s books, Clare wants to make such moments possible for all parents reading and talking to their kids. The first three books in the series pictured here are all conversation starters.
Creatures
Creatures are looking for children to create stories in which they can live.
Words
Words are looking for children’s voices to speak their meaning.
Aliens
Aliens are looking for earthlings to undo a bit of a mess they’ve made.
Provoking Stories
Parents help children tell stories all the time. They draw stories out of them as they are dressing and feeding them. Mothers are known to provoke, question and, yes, at times even embarrass their children.
With a Roald Dahl style of absurdity, the adults in the books show their many flaws. It’s the gloriousness of mistakes that make the series perfect for ‘Young Philosophers’.
Why shouldn’t supporting parents help children develop literacy skills be joyful? It is a joy through which they can value their own stories and the sense of humanity within them.
Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human shows us why we long for creative ways of sharing stories. We are the only storymaking species on the planet.
Positive parenting through conversations
Here’s an example of how a parent might use The Book With No Story.
For a start, the fun in the book comes from Clare tangling up her real-life into her invention of 52 creatures, showing children how the characteristics of her friends and family have inspired her imagination.
The whole book is about striving to be a great storyteller and a good writer. Clare explains this to the children in the resource that accompanies the book:
The photographs you see of creatures are based on real people, some are in my family and the rest are my friends. That DOES NOT MEAN that the creatures themselves act like the people in the photographs. I love how my “real life” and my “imaginary life” are different parts of me. They co-exist in the same picture, in the same story. I believe my imagination allows me to interpret my “real life”, helping me to make sense of it.
The Book With No Story – Activity Book 1
When You Meet Kasperwish is a resource that gives children, even more, help on their writing skills.
Homework Helping Activity Books
Clare reckons that the relationship between facts and fiction is THE topic to talk about with children. Philosophically speaking, it is an essential topic for understanding how they form their view of the world.
Works of fiction give us a chance to focus on particular human traits intensely. They allow us to express our feelings about really complicated stuff.
INTRODUCING attachment smith
The source of the ATTACHMENT SMITH creature is me.
What have the author Clare and Illustrator Yong seen in me to create the image and the character description? I recognise something of ‘me’ in Attachment Smith. Like me, she has an ageing face, and her hair has a hint of grey.
Small books with big impact
As you can see through my image, the use of contemporary collage by Yongho Moon is unique. Collage is not typically considered a style of visual art ‘for children’. We know, don’t we that digital technologies make creating collages a popular artform through photoshopping? You might be interested to look at the power for bringing images together and make something original emerge pastiche-like. A bit like positive parenting itself, in which moments of love come together to create a lifelong impact.