My children might now be reading the likes of Shatter Me, Red Queen and New Moon independently, but I have very fond memories of reading stories to them.

Judith Kerr’s Mog books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea; Spot the Dog, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, loads from Usborne’s touchy-feely That’s not my… series and the wonderful My Mum book by Anthony Browne were firm favourites. A plethora of Julia Donaldson books including The Gruffalo, The Smartest Giant in Town, The Highway Rat, What the Ladybird Heard and Room on the Broom also featured regularly as bedtime (and daytime!) stories.

Julia Donaldson and the Gruffalo

A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good…

It looks like we weren’t alone in our love of Julia Donaldson books. A survey commissioned by The Works reveals that nearly 20 percent of parents will choose one of her titles as the first book they read to their child. The modern classic The Gruffalo tops the list and is selected by one in eight parents. Released in 1999, The Gruffalo has sold over 13 million copies to date.

My girls loved the Gruffalo. We had the book in different versions (as well as The Gruffalo’s Child), had lots of merchandise and even had the Match and Memory Board Game!

The top 10 first books parents read to their children:

1. The Gruffalo – Julia Donaldson
2. The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle
3. That’s Not My…  – Fiona Watt
4. Guess How Much I Love You – Sam McBratney
5. Peppa Pig
6. Spot – Eric Hill
7. The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
8. Dear Zoo – Rod Campbell
9. Winnie the Pooh – A. A. Milne 
10. Harry Potter – J. K. Rowling

The research highlighted that 44% of parents read to children from birth. This is certainly what we did, and I’m convinced it fostered my children’s love of reading.

The First Books We Remember

A certain series featuring a boy wizard tops the charts in terms of the books that we remember as our first read. The survey highlights that 5% of the population cite one of the J.K. Rowling books as the first they remember reading either independently or having read to them. 

The second book on the list is Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree followed by the author’s Famous Five series. Winnie the Pooh and The Very Hungry Caterpillar complete the top five.

Roald Dahl features prominently in the top 10 with The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all making the list with 13% of the respondents recalling something written by the author. For me it was George’s Marvellous Medicine.

Gruffalo versus a Caterpillar

Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar – which has sold over 50 million copies since its 1969 release – is the only book to feature in the top five of both lists. That is it’s the book we most remember being read to us and one of the first books we read to our own children. I certainly remember it on both sides of the fence!

World Book Day 2024

World Book Day, a charity that operates in the UK and Ireland, aims to enrich lives by promoting a love of books and reading. Whilst dressing up has become a big aspect of the annual celebrations there are plenty of other activities and ways to engage from ‘adopting an author’ to redesigning book covers and being a contributing author in ‘story consequences’.

Find out more below:

World Book Day takes place on Thursday, March 7th 2024. The Works are supporting the charity and are encouraging children and parents to bring their £1 book token into stores any time up until March 31st to exchange their token for a book from the World Book Day 2024 range.

You can find out further information here: https://www.theworks.co.uk/page/world-book-day.html

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World Book Day and Dressing Up

I’m a massive advocate of nurturing a lifelong love of reading. I also like the idea of anything that promotes this. However, the whole dressing up rigmarole that accompanies World Book Day (WBD) often eclipses its aim. All the mums I’ve spoken to seem pretty unanimous in their weariness about this aspect of WBD – “I just need something cheap and easy” is the cry.  

First there’s the process of deciding on the character. This is labour intensive. I listed all the great books my children had read and suggested characters from these. However, every idea was vetoed. Then we had the discussion about why they couldn’t go as film characters. At 11, my eldest just wants to be the same as her friends and dress up as Thing One, Thing Two and Thing Three despite not enjoying the Dr Seuss books.   

Finding the time

Life is busy. I don’t really have much time (and crucially ability) to make three costumes. We try to find stuff at home that can be used and adapted, but that only gets us so far, so I end up having to spend money to complete costumes. That’s another downside; there’s a lot of pressure on time poor parents to throw money at the whole thing.

Also some children hate dressing up. Maria was all set on being Delphie from one of the Darcey Bussell books and then panicked that “the boys would laugh at her for being in a ballerina dress.” I’ve talked her round.

Other things to do on World Book Day

There are umpteen dressing up events at our school throughout the year, perhaps the focus of WBD could be on other activities…

Some ideas

My children have been set a number of reading tasks by school to complete. It’s more interesting than it sounds…

Michael Rosen’s suggestion

One of our favourites, Michael Rosen, got back to me on Twitter and suggested Adopt an author

Adopt an author: each class chooses an author for the day, find out everything they can about that author, make posters, read out bits of their books, read whole books. Classes work out how to do a presentation of a book and do the pres. for another class.— Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) March 2, 2020

He says to be imaginative when presenting a book to another class. For example, do ‘freeze frames’, act out a scene, do a mime from a scene from the book while someone narrates, do ‘guess the book’ shows, quizzes, mock interviews with the ‘author’ or a character from the book.

Get in a guest author

The money that would be spent on costumes could contribute towards getting in a guest author. As the late Jonny Zucker said in an article for The Guardian:

…if an author visit goes well, some pupils will get more of a writing confidence-boost in one day than they normally would in a whole term; some will crack how to plot a story and will go off to compose their first magnum opus; and some will discover that writing can actually be fun.

Jonny Zucker

Competitions and games

• The children at my friend’s daughter’s school are redesigning book covers for a competition. What a lovely activity and something that helps children translate words to pictures.

• Play consequences – Everyone in class gets the chance to become a contributing author in this traditional parlour game. Perhaps the resulting ‘story’ can then be expanded and edited.   
  
• Read part of an unfamiliar text together as a class and then each child writes the rest of the story.  

Get creative

Get them to channel their inner Roald Dahl and make their own version of a Gobblefunk dictionary of descriptive made-up words

Use you library

Get involved with your local library. Many libraries run special events for World Book Day for children of all ages. Keep an eye on your local library’s social media channels and website for details of events. Here are some for Surrey libraries

What was decided

This year, after much deliberation, we’ll have Delphie from Delphie and the Magic Ballet Shoes, the eponymous Matilda and Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

Finally…

If it all gets too much just remember the dad who took inspiration from the Argos catalogue…

You might also like:

The Gruffalo Tops the Charts as World Book Day 2024 Approaches

The Summer Reading Challenge

Should Fairy Tales be Banned?

The Benefits of Reading as a Family – guest post

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