I am currently working in Alternative Provision, supporting learners online. The children and young people I meet from day to day face significant challenges. Their pathway through education has been turbulent and building relationships of trust takes a great deal of patient perseverance.
During our online sessions, my treasure trove of picturebooks and the loan of my husband’s visualiser have poured oil on troubled waters in a remarkable way. I have been quietly amazed to see countenances relax, moods soften and conversations open through the pages of my picturebooks. Shaun Tan’s ‘The Red Tree’ has been a favourite for many:
Several weeks into one lesson series, I heard a scowling teenager laugh for the first time as I introduced them to Jon Klassen’s ‘I want my hat back’. The book proved to be a breakthrough and they were keen to read all of Jon Klassen’s hat trilogy:
In a recent online session, I invited a young person to chose from a selection of picturebooks.
Their joyful, heartfelt response when they saw ‘Owl Babies’ reminded me of a blog post I published on my previous website in March 2016:
https://learningtoreadandwrite.weebly.com/julias-blog/falling-in-love-with-storybooks
Falling in Love with Storybooks
Several years ago now, I ran a course of one-to-one literacy lessons for a fifteen year old girl, at an educational unit for young people labelled with ‘Behavioural, Emotional and Social Difficulties’.
During the sessions she attended, my teenage student showed real promise as both a reader and writer. There were interruptions to the lesson series. At times she was too angry to come into the classroom. On other occasions, she struggled to find the resilience needed to work at a difficulty and left the room – slamming the door behind her.
For our final lesson together, I selected a range of my favourite children’s books – curious to see the response they would receive. I was not disappointed. Her arrival was stormy, but the subsequent transformation in the slumped, despondent figure behind the table fascinated me. Her sullen expression lit up with a smile when she recognised the front cover of Rod Campbell’s ‘Dear Zoo’.
“I used to love opening the flaps in that book,” she reminisced, her smile broadening. She unfolded her arms and reached forward to leaf through the pages. Continuing to look through the pile of books, her eyes fell on Martin Waddell’s ‘Owl Babies’.
“I LOVED this book!” she exclaimed, “I remember reading this story in Year 4, no, no, it was Year 2!”
The warm connection she felt towards the storybook was tangible and moving.
I have only seen the young lady once since, when we waved at each other across the yard, but I continue to reflect on what I witnessed that morning:
What were those happy memories, so obviously revived by being reunited with a book she had loved as a child?
Were they inextricably linked to a good relationship with the adult who had shared the book with her?
Did the book remind her of more settled times in her life?
How much of an influence had those early, clearly positive, experiences of books had upon the level of success she now enjoyed as a reader and writer?
What more can we do to provide young children with positive, formative, storybook memories to carry through their lives?
All these burning questions continue to spur me on in my efforts to build community through Shared Reading… and yet another question is motivating me in my quest to find a better future for the disaffected young people of today:
What more can we do to improve the mental health of today’s teenagers by reviving their positive, formative, storybook memories?
Hold that thought. There are more to come…
Read with Julia 
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