A reading festival

20 August, 2018

As my children get older, I am more aware of my role in transmitting values. When they were toddlers, my job as a mother was more about giving them a sense of security, developing a strong attachment, helping them become socially skilled, and providing them with a stable and rhythmic environment. This is still the case, but now that the older ones are of school age, I question a lot about the scope of my interventions and the values I want to transmit to them through them.

Highlighting the journey to autonomy

One of the values I hope to help them develop is autonomy: the desire to make their own decisions, to take responsibility for their own choices, to know themselves better, to choose their future, to invent themselves! For me, it is therefore essential to highlight all the steps of their journey to autonomy. The traditional rituals that marked the stages of my own autonomy development have disappeared. In fact, we rejected them because of their religious character, which did not suit us. That being said, my husband and I needed to reconnect with "educational" rituals to mark the new stages in our children's lives, those stages that led them to greater autonomy. As Philippe Meirieu, an author and education specialist whom I particularly admire, so eloquently puts it, "Modernity is characterized by the collapse of these traditional rituals. But the need for benchmarks has not disappeared." So we decided to invent our own rituals, rituals that let our children know that, thanks to the new stages they were reaching, we now looked at them differently.

The Reading Festival ritual

This is how the Reading Festival was born in our home! One of the stages that, according to our values, truly deserved to be highlighted is learning to read. If your child has already gone through first grade, you know as well as I do that this learning is one of the most surprising. First, it happens so quickly, but above all, it gives the child unprecedented independence. Thanks to reading, our little one can now decode the society around him and thus become more a part of it. He can understand the highway code, he can read a menu in a restaurant, he can follow instructions without our help, he can discover a wealth of information in books or simply escape into all sorts of stories. What an emancipation!

To highlight this magnificent passage in the development of autonomy, here is what we set up for our eldest, Louis, last year, and which will be repeated this year for his brother Laurier, as well as for the others in the years to come. This reading festival takes place as soon as one of our youngsters manages to read a book (however small!) from cover to cover. We have carefully selected and wrapped about ten books according to his interests. We tried to include books of various literary genres, such as novels, comic books, documentaries, picture books, "how-to" books, poetry, and fables. To top it all off, we asked significant adults (grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, etc.) around him to take a moment to write him a letter. In this letter, they told him how proud they were of him for having become a little reader, but they also recounted their own reading memories and the reasons why they still loved to read. We were very lucky that all these wonderful people played along. Every evening, Louis was allowed to open a package and a letter. It was really fun for him to discover a new book, write his name in it, and place it in his little personal library. It was also touching to see him concentrating on reading the letter from grandma or his older cousin Malie-Ana. Who still gets to read letters today? He had that chance; through reading, he had a moment of intimacy with these adults who are important to him. But what was also fantastic was the gaze of his siblings, who considered him lucky to be so grown up and to receive this attention. As he got older, Louis had more responsibilities; he was the only one leaving for school in the morning while we all stayed home. This lovely ritual certainly helped him accept this break, accept these additional responsibilities, and value the fact that he had to do more than the others. He now had a status that his brothers and sisters did not have. For their part, the younger ones looked forward to growing up and dreamed of that moment!

Other rituals to come

Meirieu mentions it and I agree with him, "too many rituals kill rituals!" It is therefore important to carefully select the stages you deem important to highlight. There is no need to highlight every small achievement; you need to define which events have symbolic significance and deserve attention. Thus, we have also instituted the bicycle driving permit ritual, which I invite you to discover right here. There will also certainly be something related to their first exercise of the right to vote, or something else along the way! To be continued...

Other little tricks to encourage a love of reading in children:

*How to Help Our Children Succeed, Philippe Meirieu, Bayard Éditions, France, 2015

 

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