We Trust Much To Good Books
Dear Parents,
Before I get to my note, I want to let you know that we are hosting our Fall Open House next Saturday, October 21 at 9am. Please share this information (or our posts on social media) with parents you know who are looking for a school home. We’d love to meet them. They can RSVP here: https://calendly.com/ambleside/open-house
In my search this month through the Ambleside Notes archives, I came across this from 2006. It is an excerpt of a letter from a parent on our mandatory, nightly reading:
“Half-hour Reading? How?? Part of every student’s homework at Ambleside is a half-hour of reading each evening. I don’t know about your homes, but in mine, that has been a dreamy goal for many years – the sort of thing that good moms can do, but I am too busy keeping my kids clean and fed. Well, fed.”
Maybe, like me, you can relate to the thoughts above. For years, my family substituted the assigned 30 minutes of reading with 30 minutes of family read aloud. We cruised through many excellent books and had much to discuss.
My son was a reticent reader on his own, and it wasn’t until 5th grade that his reading for pleasure really took off. For him, it was finding books that he could really dig into that made all the difference. Before that, he was stuck on Usborne’s Illustrated Norse Myths. He must have read that book a dozen times. Stories of Odin, Thor, and Loki alongside illustrations of the mighty characters and maps of the various realms are rich fodder for the imagination of a young boy … 12 times over, apparently!
What he needed was something new, and it took talking to other parents, checking out book lists, and going to the library to find ones that he enjoyed but that were not twaddle.
Charlotte Mason wrote in Parents and Children that, “We trust much to good books… We know that there is a storehouse of thought wherein we may find all the great ideas that have moved the world. We are above all things anxious to give the child the key to this storehouse.”
So how can one tell the difference between a good book and twaddle? What even is twaddle?
The Oxford English dictionary defines twaddle as “senseless, silly, or trifling writing.” Mason says to beware.
When we set out over a year ago to create a premier “living books” library, we had a storehouse of good books in mind. Excellent books, across genres and age levels, would fill its shelves, and each student at Ambleside would be given a key.
What we want, at a most basic level, is to produce what Mason calls “reading people” — people who continue to read and enjoy books throughout their lives, not just when the assignments end.
Books enrich our lives. They inspire and they instruct, and when your students visit our library each week, we hope they will find books that they will love.
Our Library Blessing is this Friday, October 13 at 9am. Come and see the beautiful space and join us in praying for all who enter in.
Affectionately,
Krise Nowak, M.Ed.
Head of School