ELA 20 A2 Section: Childhood Wonder & Imagination
If you recall, when you did the Childhood Mapping Activity, it hopefully trigger memories for you of when you were a child. That’s one of the enjoyable parts of this Course – the nostalgia it brings up of some of the happy experiences in your childhood development.
This next section aims to continue that process, specifically this initial beginning, by remembering what it was like during storytime.
What was it like being read to as a child? Do you remember?
For example, it may have included:
- lots of picture books
- a comfortable location you and an adult usually settled in for reading
- some favourite books you listened to over and over
- an adult who may have read with character voices or sound effects
- lots of interesting visuals and illustrations in the books, for a child to fixate on while they listened to the story
- animals or non-living things that took on life or mystical/magical elements in the stories, like fairies or princesses cursed by witches
- Unknown to you, it may also have included some darker, scarier elements, like in the fairytales where the parents took their kids to the forest so they could leave them there where a witch catches them, fattens them up, so she can eat them!
- A memory of mine from youth – attending Reading Time at the Saskatoon Frances Morrison Library. There was a children’s reading room we had to duck under a small door to get into.
To try to trigger for you what it felt like to sit and watch someone read to you a picture book, listen to the audio linked below: it includes our intro thoughts to this section and reading of the Big Ideas.
- Listen to our class discussion and reading of the picture book.
- While you listen to that audio, you could also follow along with the picture book images from the following YouTube video.
Other examples of childhood imagination on display:
- fairy gardens
- elf on the shelf holiday traditions
- kids playing behaviour modelled by adults
- imaginative shows/characters that children believe are real