A reading party
20 August, 2018
Since my children are getting older, I have become more aware of my role in transmitting values. When they were very young, my job as a mother was more to give them a feeling of security, to develop a strong bond of attachment, to help them become socially adept and to give them a stable and well-paced environment. This is still the case, but now that the oldest are of school age, I question myself a lot about the scope of my interventions and the values I wish to transmit to them through them. Emphasize access to autonomy One of the values that I hope to bring them to develop is autonomy. The desire to make decisions for themselves, to assume their own choices, to know themselves better, to choose their future, to invent what! For me, it is therefore essential to highlight all the stages of their access to autonomy. The traditional rituals that marked the stages in the development of my own autonomy have disappeared. In fact, we rejected them because of their religious character which did not suit us. That said, my husband and I needed to reconnect with "educational" rituals to highlight the new stages in the lives of our children. These stages which brought them towards more autonomy. As Philippe Meirieu, a writer and specialist in the educational sciences that I particularly like, writes so well, ''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 steps they were going through, we now looked at them differently. 
The Festival of Reading ritual This is how the Festival of Reading was born with us! One of the stages that, according to our values, really deserves to be highlighted is learning to read. If your child has already gone through the first year, you know like me that this learning is one of the most surprising. First, because it is done so quickly, but above all because it provides the child with unprecedented independence. Thanks to reading, our little one can now decode the society around him and thereby become more part of it. He can understand the rules of the road, he can read a menu at a restaurant, he can follow a manual without our help, he can discover a lot of information in the books or even just get away from it all. 'stories. What emancipation! To highlight this magnificent passage in the development of autonomy, here is what we set up for our great Louis last year, and which will be repeated this year for his brother Laurier and for the others in the years to come. This celebration of reading takes place as soon as one of our mosses arrives to read a book (however small it is!) From cover to cover. We carefully selected and packaged ten books based on his interests. We have attempted to include books of various literary genres, including novels, comics, documentaries, albums, "how to" books, poetry and fables. To top it off, we asked the 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 to have become a little reader now, but they also told him about their own memories of reading and the reasons why they still loved to read. We were very lucky that all of these wonderful people got involved. 
Each 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 on it and put it in his little personal library. It was also touching, to see him focused on reading the letter from grandma or his great cousin Malie-Ana. Who still has the chance to read letters today? He had this chance, by reading he had a moment of intimacy with these adults who are important to him. But what was also fantastic was the eyes of the brothers and sisters, who found him lucky to be so tall and to be entitled to this attention. As we got older, Louis had more responsibilities, he was the only one to leave for school in the morning while we all stayed at home. This pretty ritual certainly helped him to accept this rupture, to accept these additional responsibilities and to value the fact of having to do more than the others. He now had that status that his siblings did not have. For their part, the little ones saw with a good eye the fact of growing up and dreamed of this moment! 
Other rituals to come Meirieu mentions it and I agree with him, "too many rituals kill the rituals!"It is therefore important to carefully select the stages that you think are important to highlight. No need to highlight each little achievement, we must define which events have a symbolic significance and deserve to be looked at. Thus, we also set up the ritual of driver's license which I invite you to discover right here. There will also certainly be something related to the first practice of their right to vote, or something else along the way! To be continued... * How to help our children succeed, Philippe Meirieu, Bayard Éditions, France, 2015
The Festival of Reading ritual This is how the Festival of Reading was born with us! One of the stages that, according to our values, really deserves to be highlighted is learning to read. If your child has already gone through the first year, you know like me that this learning is one of the most surprising. First, because it is done so quickly, but above all because it provides the child with unprecedented independence. Thanks to reading, our little one can now decode the society around him and thereby become more part of it. He can understand the rules of the road, he can read a menu at a restaurant, he can follow a manual without our help, he can discover a lot of information in the books or even just get away from it all. 'stories. What emancipation! To highlight this magnificent passage in the development of autonomy, here is what we set up for our great Louis last year, and which will be repeated this year for his brother Laurier and for the others in the years to come. This celebration of reading takes place as soon as one of our mosses arrives to read a book (however small it is!) From cover to cover. We carefully selected and packaged ten books based on his interests. We have attempted to include books of various literary genres, including novels, comics, documentaries, albums, "how to" books, poetry and fables. To top it off, we asked the 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 to have become a little reader now, but they also told him about their own memories of reading and the reasons why they still loved to read. We were very lucky that all of these wonderful people got involved. Each 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 on it and put it in his little personal library. It was also touching, to see him focused on reading the letter from grandma or his great cousin Malie-Ana. Who still has the chance to read letters today? He had this chance, by reading he had a moment of intimacy with these adults who are important to him. But what was also fantastic was the eyes of the brothers and sisters, who found him lucky to be so tall and to be entitled to this attention. As we got older, Louis had more responsibilities, he was the only one to leave for school in the morning while we all stayed at home. This pretty ritual certainly helped him to accept this rupture, to accept these additional responsibilities and to value the fact of having to do more than the others. He now had that status that his siblings did not have. For their part, the little ones saw with a good eye the fact of growing up and dreamed of this moment!
Other rituals to come Meirieu mentions it and I agree with him, "too many rituals kill the rituals!"It is therefore important to carefully select the stages that you think are important to highlight. No need to highlight each little achievement, we must define which events have a symbolic significance and deserve to be looked at. Thus, we also set up the ritual of driver's license which I invite you to discover right here. There will also certainly be something related to the first practice of their right to vote, or something else along the way! To be continued... * How to help our children succeed, Philippe Meirieu, Bayard Éditions, France, 2015