It tasted like cardboard. Literary cardboard. Tasteless characters, simplified plot, with bland language. Martha, my friend and mentor, cocked her head to one side as I explained we had taken her advice and I read aloud the Greater Illustrated version of Heidi and we weren’t impressed. When I finished she smiled and handed me a weighty thick book saying, “You need to read the REAL Heidi. Here, read this; it is my favorite translation from German.” Intimidated and doubtful, I countered with, “But she is only 5 years old. We can’t read that.” Martha was confident and challenged me to just try.
While my 3 year old son napped we read together a chapter a day… and fell in love with Heidi and Grandfather! We could smell the wind in the firs and laughed at the kittens. We mourned when Heidi did. As we raced to the end, it was obvious we had become friends with this book. It was a banquet of character development, rising and falling action and rich language. We now had a common set of memories to reference in our conversations and unknowingly I had modeled fluent reading and helped my daughter form images in her mind as we read and discussed it.
Charlotte Mason referred to poor literature as “twaddle”. Twaddle’s definition is “trivial or foolish speech or writing; nonsense.” Twaddle dilutes rich literature by watering it down and undervalues the intelligence of a child. Though children lack life experience, they can understand books far above their reading ability. They are capable of hearing and comprehending “worthy thoughts, well put” and “inspiring tales, well told”, even if they can’t read it for themselves yet. Reading aloud to children is honoring their intelligence and giving them rich experiences.
When we press into the hands of our children feeble, insignificant, silly literature we are fail our children. Mason wrote, “We feed them upon the white ashes out of which the last spark of the fire of original thought has long since died. We give them second-rate story books, with stale phrases, stale situations, shreds of other people’s thoughts, stalest of stale sentiments. They complain that they know how the story will end! But that is not all; they know how every dreary page will unwind itself.” School Education, p121 by Charlotte Mason
Gleaned approaches:
- Read aloud rich unabridged literature to children and engage their intellect and discuss the obvious and substratum themes.
- Surreptitiously move all Greater Illustrated Books parading themselves as great literature to the back at any book sale.
- Books on our children’s reading level may include a measure of twaddle, but we can still choose between Captain Underpants and Charlotte’s Web.
Let’s honor our children’s intelligence and serve them a literature banquet rather than cardboard. Let’s introduce them to the real Heidi and hundreds of other rich full characters, so they fall in love with reading and long for more.
The mission of More to Grow Cognitive Development Training is to improve learning ability and function through cognitive exercises that meaningfully transfer to all educational and everyday life situations so individuals maximize their potential.