unschool monday :: story

When big owlet was about eight weeks old, I began reading to her. The sound of my voice calmed her and she would try to reach the pictures, or just gaze up at me. We read a number of books each day and it is still an important time of the day for her. She still can't sleep without a story... Little owlet has only recently enjoyed sitting and being read to. She loves books, but not so much their content as the look, feel and function of them. She loves books "but not with pictures, just words". Small leather bound books with a bit of gold on them somewhere are her favourite. She loves to "read" them to me. Unless she is very tired, she would rather climb and leap around her bed while I read, than sit and listen. She would rather sing. Her vocabulary development seemed to happen through song rather than books. She would stop and listen and then sing along when she knew the words. She loves acting out her stories too and spends hours doing so.

Fortunately big owlet loves this also and they spend all day telling each other stories. Their play has a strong narrative, as they pretend to be cats and superheroes and princesses and doctors and mummies... It often amazes me when I see them playing and then I her one of them say "and then, she whirled around the room..." or, "the little cat was hungry and she cried out... mew!" I have to really persist if I want to get their attention or talk to them when they are in the thick of it, although I do hate to interrupt a good story. I often wonder if one day soon their stories will make it to paper. They learn so much about language through their play. They are currently learning about tense and rhyming and humour, asking questions as they go. Their creativity gets a workout too and perhaps this is why they can make up poems, jokes or songs on the spot and without hesitation...



What I'm loving at the moment is watching big owlet read to tiny owlet, almost seven weeks old. Watching tiny owlet gaze at big owlet as the story falls from her lips, or watching the bigger owlets surround tiny owlet with their stories. I look forward to seeing how she will join in and what she will bring to the story.