I have fond memories of reading to my kids each night. I have a photo at my desk of my son, then 7yrs old, reading to his sister, 3yrs. in her bed. Their hair is still damp from their bath. He's reading a Cyndy Szekeres book (Frieda Fuzzypaws). Still have about 10 of her books. Another was I love you forever by Robert Munch. I have these horrible visions of little witness children being read only Watchtower material. Tell me I'm wrong.
What stories did you read to your kids, were read to you?
by azaria 6 Replies latest jw friends
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Dan-O
I grew up on The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Black Sambo, ... you know, the classics of literature.
Watchtowers were for studying while wide awake so the little heads full of mush can soak it all in.
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maxwell
Right now, I honestly can't remember my mom reading much more than "My Book of Bible Stories" to us. She read that quite a bit and we sang "Kingdom Songs". I can remember my mom singing some nursery rhymes and songs like "Here Comes Thumbkin" (a little song to identify the five fingers) to us. The singing and some other little childhood conversations/interviews got recorded on cassette tape. But we also used to watch Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, Reading Rainbow and 3-2-1 Contact on PBS quite often so maybe that rounded things out a bit. Even though my mom read WT stuff for the most part, I think the exercise in itself was valuable. They always suggest that parents read something (anything that won't harm them, even if its the newspaper) with their kids. I think that really sparked my interest in reading, which forms the basis for all other learning. I was very eager to learn reading when I entered the first grade. At the end of my first grade year, standardized testing said I was reading at a 6th grade level. One of my sisters, who was a year younger than me, would come home and show my other sister, who was 2 1/2 years younger than me, everything she did in school. She was reading before she entered school and ended up skipping the 6th or 7th grade. Can't remember exactly which. All that to say, even if the reading is all JW stuff, I think it's better than no reading at all. Some of my classmates weren't particularly interested in learning to read and it hurt them in the long run.
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scotsman
My parents read Dr Seuss and Kipling's Just So Stories to me, while my Gran made up stories about a fish called Tammy Troot. I've given the same books to my nephews/niece and made up similar Tammy Troot ones. But they're not as good as my Gran's stories.
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Dan-O
They always suggest that parents read something (anything that won't harm them, even if its the newspaper) with their kids.
Even if it's Bi-Curious George or James and the Giant Roll of Barbed Wire or Strangers Give Out the Best Candy ...
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Corvin
I loved reading to my kids! In addition to reading the Bible to them since birth, I read them Where the Wild Things Are. Great book! And also, Oh, The Places You'll Go! Also, I Love You Forever.
My gramma use to say, "when they are babies, they just step on your toes. When they get grown, they step on your heart". I miss my kids as babies.
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GentlyFeral
I read my kids so many stories that there's no way I'll be able to remember them all. A few highlights:
- Many African folktales retold by Verna Aardema
- The Hobbit
- Several Mary Poppins books
- Just For You by Mercer Meyer
- Many of the Eyewitness books - we did a lot of our homeschooling reading at bedtime
- Early Civilizations by Giovanni Cavelli (not sure I have the author's name right)
- Part of a book on John Muir by Oliver Wendell Holmes (then my son took it away from me because a chapter a night wasn't enough)
- Stickeen (by John Muir himself)
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- Just So Stories, ditto
- The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen (my personal favorite among his stories)
- James Thurber's fairy tales: The White Deer, The Great Quillow, The Wonderful O, The Thirteen Clocks (and for a week afterward my kids would sit down to dinner and declaim, "What slish is this?" Or I would answer "slish" when they asked what I was making for dinner.)
- And speaking of homeschooling, my son, at 14, read a prose translation of The Odyssey every night for a couple of weeks; kept him up till 4 am, at least one night, from sheer fascination.
- And NO Mother Goose: I never liked the so-called classics. Even when I was a tiny kid, my favorite Grimm's Fairy Tales were always the ones nobody had ever heard of: Iron John, for instance, or the Twelve Wild Swans.
GentlyFeral