Reading to kids is a non-negotiable feature of good teaching in the primary and intermediate years. Choosing good material is the hard part. Not every children’s writer is worth the effort. One criterium – apart from the fact that you need to enjoy them yourself – is quirkiness. You need something that will grab kids’ attention and, hopefully, lead them to move on and explore further.
Which leads me to the late Terry Pratchett. I wasn’t aware that he’d written quite a number of books for children. Digging into Dragons at Crumbling Castle this weekend has been an enjoyable experience. Pratchett wrote these short stories as a young man in the 1960s, but they didn’t see the light till 2014. They’re a real find.
Short stories can be polished off in a single reading. That’s especially important for day relievers. Start something more substantial and you’re likely to leave things unfinished and hanging…
Pratchett’s wry humour comes through in these 14 tales.
The Great Expedition to find the Snorry began to assemble at the harbour one misty morning.
Colonel Vest, the famous little-game hunter, told the men from the newspapers (who all had to get up at three in the morning to see him off): no one is quite sure what the Snorry looks like, so we’ll be able to tell them when we find it.
So begins ‘Hunt the Snorry’. There’s a note at the bottom of the page explaining “little-game”: Basically, anything smaller than himself, and preferably no taller than his knee.
And off they go, into “the giant tapioca forests of the Upper Amazon”.
Brilliant!
Gully Heights 