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It is generally accepted that parents should instill in their children a love of reading. What for? We asked this question to the children’s writer, director of the Children’s Book Festival, Yuri Nechiporenko, and at the same time asked him to name a list of the best children’s books.
Psychologies: Is it true that children need to be taught to read?
Yuri Nechiporenko: Yes, it is almost impossible to live in a big city without the habit of reading. Without books, a person will not master the system of cultural signs of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean everyone should read. I know wonderful people who have never read books in their lives. I’m not a fan of book culture in general. For example, my grandmother – I’m not sure she read a lot. But she was a holy person. In the famine years after the Civil War, she was trusted with flour to bake bread for everyone. They lived in a peasant community, and they needed a person who could be trusted unconditionally, who would not take a crumb for himself – and my grandmother was such a person. In rural areas, a person can do without books if he has one main Book – the Bible or the Koran – or even without a book at all if he has a moral imperative in his soul. But one cannot enter urban culture without books.
What will the child get from reading?
Yu.N .: The modern world is complex, and direct perception is not enough to see and understand it. With the help of books, the child begins to navigate in it, understand complex things, gets used to solving difficult problems, and not to give in to them. And he also becomes a person – he gets to know other people, learns to feel someone else’s pain and take into account the interests of other people. On the Internet, I somehow came across the words: “Those who read books will always control those who watch TV.”
Top 10 Books for Preschoolers and Elementary Schoolers:
From an early age – read with mom and dad:
- 1) A.S. Pushkin – all fairy tales, especially “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”
- 2) Korney Chukovsky – all fairy tales
- 3) Alan Milne “Winnie the Pooh and all-all-all”
- 4) Alexei Tolstoy “The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Pinocchio”
- 5) Antoine de Saint-Exupery “The Little Prince”
- 6) Rudyard Kipling “The Jungle Book”
- 7) Gianni Rodari “Chipollino”
- 8) Hans Christian Andersen “Tales”
- 9) John Tolkien “The Hobbit”
- 10) Astrid Lindrgen “Baby and Carlson”
As well as Russian folk tales, stories and stories by Leo Tolstoy, Charles Perrault, Boris Zhitkov, Mikhail Prishvin, Pavel Bazhov, Arkady Gaidar, Konstantin Paustovsky, Yuri Koval, Setton-Thompson, Gerald Durrell and all children’s classics – in unlimited quantities.
But after all, not everyone wants to control others?
Yu.N .: No, not all. But a person as a person wants to be a subject, not an object – this is the essence. He wants to be free, and books open the way to this personal freedom.
How can we instill in our children a love of reading?
Yu.N .: First of all, read yourself: with interest, delight, develop your taste for literature and read new things all the time, share what you read: retell plots, describe your impressions. Read with your child – and not even from the first years, but from the very first months of his life! So that the book becomes as familiar and necessary as a rattle, like a toy – but only a very interesting toy, behind which whole worlds open up. Read aloud with expression.
Top 10 Books for Middle and Older Students:
- 1) Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- 2) Robert Louis Stevenson “Treasure Island”
- 3) Lewis Carroll “Alice in Wonderland”
- 4) Yuri Olesha “Three fat men”
- 5) Jerome Salinger “The Catcher in the Rye”
- 6) Alexandre Dumas “Three Musketeers”
- 7) Valentin Kataev “The lonely sail turns white”
- 8) Daniel Dafoe “Robinson Crusoe”
- 9) Lev Kassil “My dear boys”
- 10) Dante Alighieri “New Life”
Still – Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne, Yaroslav Gashek, Conan Doyle, Fenimore Cooper, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Clive Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, O. Henry and all the classics – without limitation.