I had a beautiful leather bag in the 4th grade in which I kept what any little girl would keep: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Tennyson, and a journal. It’s funny, but it’s no joke. I was a bookworm in the deepest sense of the word. I have always had a real love for classic literature, and I think I love it now, more than ever.
Of all the challenges I knew having children would provide, I was blindsided by the challenge of reading to my children. I laboriously paged through much, as Charlotte Mason coined it, twaddle. I was trying to instill a love of books in my kids, no matter the book. Thankfully that error came to a quick end. Life is too short for twaddle. So as my kids were becoming professional little public library patrons, I had to strike while the iron was hot. It is our job as parents to steer our children toward eating healthy, steer them toward good habits, and steer them toward good books. This doesn’t mean that an easy-reader Paw Patrol has never crossed our threshold, it just means their appetite for rich literature has been whetted at an early age.
But the biggest lesson, I believe, is that an appetite for good literature breeds discernment. I so enjoy it when one of my children comes to me with a book to return to the library early, because the author had an agenda, or the character being portrayed as good, was in fact, not. I confess that I fantasize too frequently the graduation out of the grammar stage into logic and rhetoric, so we can finally attack Crime and Punishment, and all of Jane Austen, as a family. It will come. Until then the enjoyment I have found in reading excellent children’s literature is priceless. As C.S. Lewis stated, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
Are you looking for some book recommendations for your student? You can find great ones here!