I have started a book The Demon Dentist by David Walliams. I am hoping to Facebook my great grandson once a week to discuss the book and the characters. He is nine years old and not very keen to read out of school. Do you have any tips for me and how to go about keeping him interested. We don’t live close but he seemed keen to try my idea. Any help would be gratefully received.
How lucky your great-grandson is that you are interested in sharing stories with him! A regular Facebook discussion sounds like an excellent idea. You could try using Skype as well.
The conversation around reading and the pooled enjoyment – or disappointment – of the books you read is such an important part of developing an interest in reading and it providing your great-grandson with the tools to develop his own writing skills. Try to keep the questions open-ended as possible so that your great-grandson can see that there is no “right or wrong” response to a story; it is what he thinks about it that matters.
You could adopt and adapt the excellent “Tell Me” framework devised by Aidan Chambers and best-described in his book Tell Me; Children, Reading and Talk. It’s written for teachers but equally applicable in a family setting, the Tell Me approach is based on asking four questions: “Likes - what caught your attention? What made you want to keep reading? Dislikes - was there anything that put you off reading? Puzzles - was there anything you found strange or surprising? Patterns and Connections - were there any patterns you noticed? Did it remind you of anything?”
At home, you may want to ask these questions in a different way and you may only want to do one at a time but they are useful for getting a conversation off the ground; they’ll give you both a nudge to get started and then a lot of space to enjoy talking about books.
By starting with David Walliams’s The Demon Dentist you will have shown that you are up to date with what your great grandson and his friends are likely to enjoy.
Since David Walliams is generally seen as one of the most successful heirs to Roald Dahl in terms of his style and his popularity, Dahl’s classic titles including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny the Champion of the World, The Witches and Matilda would all be worth trying.
Also popular could be Gillian Cross’s stories about a different demon – The Demon Headmaster. Dinah thinks that adapting to her new foster family will be a challenge but, when she gets to her new school, she finds that is where the real challenge lies. There is something very odd going on as all the children do exactly what the Head tells them! How does he have so much power? Dinah is determined to find out!
For a quite different kind of humour, Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre’s Pugs of the Frozen North is a madcap, laugh-out-loud adventure which begins with the story of the survival of Shen the cabin boy after all his shipmates desert him when the ship is stuck in the ice. All Shen has for company is 64 pugs who are part of the cargo. But then Shika turns up and all she wants is – a lot of dogs! Shen, Shika and the dogs team up to take part in Race to the Top of the World. Together, they set out to the prize which is nothing less than their hearts’ desire.
Michael Morpurgo tells stories of all kinds so it is worth looking at what particularly your great grandson might like. For adventure, Kensuke’s Kingdom tells an exciting and moving story of a boy who is swept overboard from his parent’s boat and cast up on a deserted island with only his dog for company. But it turns out that he is not alone. How the boy makes friends with the original inhabitant of the island is beautifully told. For a classic story for a nine-year-old, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives is a perfectly constructed adventure as Emil and this newly made friends from the streets of Berlin set about trying to solve a crime.
Margaret Walden, a grandmother whose granddaughter has been a long term member of the Guardian children’s books site (initially Margaret helped her join the site) is also interested in engaging in her grandchild’s reading. She looked after her granddaughter when she was very small and began sharing books with her at a young age - talking about the pictures and reading the stories aloud. “I read to her for hours every day. I think I was as much concerned with the quality of the language as that of the story.” Passing on advice for a nine-year-old reader she added; “I think that the books that have made her feel passionate about literature are those that have shaped her thinking about life. Two books that come to mind are; David Almond’s My Name is Mina and Shadow by Michael Morpurgo. My daughter felt really angry when she found out that people who had left their own country because they were afraid could be locked up here. Another is Phoenix by S F Said. ”
As Margaret has found, while you and your great-grandson continue your conversations about books and he develops as a reader who can comment on what he has read and what he thought about it, you will be able to draw more and more on what he knows he likes.
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Please share you tips on reading with children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – and book recommendations on the best books to share together email childrens.books@theguardian.com or on Twitter @GdnChildrensBks and we’ll add them to this blog. You can also ask the Book Doctor a question on Twitter or email using #BookDoctor.
Some really good suggestions here! Many @beanstalkreads children don't have grandparents of own so keen to help them https://t.co/6ZTBWSXiWy
— Kate Loynes (@kjloy) September 21, 2015
If you could be a stand-in grandparent to an @beanstalkreads child then please ask us how you can help 02077308259 https://t.co/6ZTBWSXiWy
— Kate Loynes (@kjloy) September 21, 2015
@GdnChildrensBks 40 years on, we still talk about The Wind in the Willows , the Jungle Book and Roald Dahl.
— Sir Foxley-Fox (@Sirfoxleyfox) September 22, 2015
