Edutainment, I know it sounds like something you’d see on TV. We all know as adults that reading is good for us, it’s good for our children, sort of like broccoli is good for us. And any kid is going to react against that. And when I was growing up, there was this sense that reading was a little suspect. You’re supposed to be out playing with your friends. You weren’t supposed to have your nose in a book, so that made me want to read even more.
The whole idea of edutainment is actually thinking about presenting reading in a way that’s playful for kids, that’s really going to involve them, that’s going to have them interacting with the book or the text and just having a good time. And probably the best way to ensure the kids were having a good time was if the adults who is doing the reading is also having a good time. And there’s lots of ways you can do that, you can as you’re reading aloud to kids take on different voices.
You know gesture broadly, involve the kids in interacting so that for example with Jo MacDonald Saw a Pond they come in with the E-I-E-I-O refrain, they act out the parts of the animals. With some of the books with older kids it’s even doing something like, like building a craft around a theme or an aspect of the book.
And for the Jackson Jones series, I’ll often go in and do a gardening craft with the kids, we grow a little sweet potato in the tub. Doing that little gardening craft helps make the work more engaging to the kids, they read about Jackson working in his garden but when they have a chance to work in a school garden for example or even grow a little sweet potato in a tub like the craft activity I share with them, they see what it means to wait for the leaves to appear and the roots to appear. And they do get excited.
And it seems to make them want to learn more about things related to that book. So not just the book itself but books about gardening for example or books about other characters interested in the natural world