This is an extract from a review by Kate Parker on creativefreeplay.com – many thanks! A link to the full review can be found at the foot of the page.
The style of the book (The Genius of Natural Childhood by Sally Goddard Blyth published by the Hawthorne Press) is for it to be dipped into as well as read from cover to cover. It is aimed at both professionals and parents which I think it does very well. It is one of the few books where reading the Introduction is not only interesting but useful towards the rest of the book! Sally lays it out so that a few chapters are for use (straight dipping into for parents), interspersed with chapters explaining the reasons behind the dipping into chapters (for parents who want to know why and professionals). I think that the ‘dipping into chapters’ could be closer to the beginning to make it more enticing to the parent, but that is a personal choice. For me, it did feel like wading through a lot of information before I got to the stuff that I could do, interesting though it was.
I wish that I had read this book before I had my first child as I would have loved to use the rhymes and songs and stories that the author uses. I will be introducing them to my children even now as I know how much enjoyment they get from rhymes and rhymes that require movement or being touched. The book emphasises how important sound, rhythm and reading to children is on many levels without being too forceful about it. This we do already but it convinces me how important it is to keep reading to my children especially at night-time.
One aspect really intrigued me was the use of fairy tales and how some of them seem horrible to us as adults (even if we know the story) but to children they are a means of teaching subtle ideas such as greed, kindness, hope, love, envy without actually describing them and her opinion is that children take on board the ideas without worrying about the more negative aspects of the human character…
Kate Parker
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Read the full review here…