Reading with a child

25 May 2016

In this project I would like to try a new activity that I have never done before - to read an English book to my daughter. From my point of you, it is a very good idea and I am pretty curious about my daughter's reaction.

Well, as mentioned above I've decided to read a book to my younger daughter. She is 11 years old and she likes animals so it was quite easy to choose the genre of the book. She is very good at English at her age so I thing she will enjoy the reading. The title of the book is "The Jungle Book" and I am sure she will like it very much. The book is too long for this task but it occured to me that I could slightly change the rules and when I came accros an article on the internet that was closely connected with the book I was sure that it would be better than reading the whole book by myself. So here is the article I'm going to read to my daughter:

  The Jungle Book.pdf (summary of the book)

At first, the article includes a paragraph where is some information about the author of the book and then there are six sections in which we can see short descriptions of each chapter of the book. The aim of the reading is to encourage my daughter to read the whole book in the future so we will see if it was a good decision to partly change the rules or not.

The process

Well, one rainy day I came to my daughter and told her that I would like to read her an article about "The Jungle Book." When she heard the title of the article she seemed to be very excited and, of course, she agreed. She was in her bed feeling comfortable.

I started with the article about the author of the book but the English was too difficult for her so I had to translate most of it. But it was different with the descriptions of chapters. The English of the chapters was quite easy to understand for her (there were some exeptions, of course) and she seemed to be happy because her eyes glittered with enthusiasm. It was exactly her cup of tea because she is a very big fun of animals. I sometimes stopped reading and asked her what she thought about the main characters so we analyzed e.g. Shere Khan's, Baloo's and Bagheera's characters but the most interesting discussion we had was about Kaa because his character wasn't easy to identify. The other animals were either good or bad but Kaa differed from them which was really good because it made us to thing. The analysis of the characters were very good idea, my daughter loved it and I am sure she felt that she became a part of something big and mainly, her opinions were taken seriously. 

I didn't read a description of the last chapter in order not to reveal the denouement. I offered her two possibilities:

- I can either read the last description of the chapter or you can read the whole book on your own. She answered without hesitation that she would read the book on her own and so she did.

Reflection

Well, it was something new for both of us and I must admit that when I saw how she was enthusiastic and happy I almost cried. The thing is, that I don't have much time to do that kind of activities and during the reading I realised that I missed it very much. Everything went well and thanks to the reading she was encouraged to read the book by herself but I thing that it became less important. The greatest thing about the reading was that she could spend wonderful time with her father and it made her happy. Moreover, I am greatful for the realization that we shouldn't forget what or who is the most important in our lives - our children and people who we love.