Thanks to my dear friend Jessica Collins and her column “On the Children’s Shelf,” I’ve been, over the last year, rediscovering my love of children’s literature. In a recent piece, she shared a related reading resolution that is dear to my heart: Making time for family reading and reading aloud together.
Family read aloud time is my favorite time. I love the shared experience of the words and images and how the shared experience invites us to slow down. I love how it changes the way we receive and process a story. I love talking about the characters as if they’re our mutual friends and rehashing what parts of the story we each connected to and what parts most resonated. I love sharing my favorite pastime with my favorite people.
My last read of 2015 was a book that would make a lovely family read aloud: Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye