Posted by Jock on January 19, 2008 at 14:04:58 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: FLASHMAN posted by Adam Quinan on January 19, 2008 at 12:46:00:
Adam's link leads, not just to lists of good books for children (three lists for different ages), but to an excellent article Children's books: 'If children are to become readers for life, they must first love stories' by Michael Morpurgo. It is so good that I have posted the link again. Here is a short extract. I think that this is relevant to Ed's point about getting a new reader to read a Ransome book.
There was once a boy brought up with books all around him. There were no walls in the house: just books, it seemed. At bedtime his mother would sit on the bed and read to him - Masefield, Kipling, Lear, De la Mare, Shakespeare - and the boy loved it because his mother loved it. He could hear it in her voice, in her laugh, in the tears in her eyes. He loved the fun, shared the sadness. He loved the music in the words. He never wanted storytime to end.
Then "unwillingly to school" he went, trudging the leafy pavements through pea-souper London smogs. From then on the stories were not magical, and they weren't musical either. Words were to be properly spelled, properly punctuated, with neat handwriting. They were not story words any more, but nouns and pronouns and verbs. Later they were used for dictation and comprehension, and all was tested and marked. A multitude of red crosses and slashes covered his exercise books, like bloody cuts.