What are your children’s favorite stories to hear and read? Most likely, you are already exposing your children to inspiring literature. In last week’s blog post, I wrote about how literature has impacted society through the generations. If you haven’t read it, you might want to, as it’s a good run down of literature throughout history. Originally past down from parents to children, stories were recorded for history, to teach values and morals and to entertain.
When we were raising our children, we began with a little board book of children’s Bible stories. The Bible is always the best place to start and it was so worn the pages came apart. Each of our children had their own and it was placed into their “special boxes” to take when they left our home. Our kids loved hearing about Noah, Adam & Eve, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. As they grew into older kids we bought a more advanced version and eventually they got their own Living Bible. From there we read other classics to our children like Fairy Tales, the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, such as The Ugly Duckling, The Princess and the Pea and The Emperor’s New Clothes. Later, we read classic American Literature. There are many anthologies published that include selections of these classics, you may remember some of them from your college textbooks, I still have mine. William Bennett,
has compiled several books about classic literature and stories from classic literature. Bennett is a former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan. If you can listen to any of his interviews on You Tube, they are very interesting and informative. He is an educator who has inspired so many.
As parents and grandparents you have a responsibility to inspire your children to be good citizens. You can do this through your actions and what you expose your children to and the stories to tell and read to them. Fill their hearts and minds with words and knowledge that will make them the best people they can be, so they can do the same and so on and so on, leading to numerous great days for generations to come.
