I find that all my Happy Marian students, from my J1 class to my P5 class, love stories. In J1, the students love hearing the teacher read stories to them during story time and are soon joining in to tell their favorite parts of the story. By P5, of course, the students are reading the stories to their teacher instead!

We all recognize that reading stories can help students expand their vocabularies, sharpen their logic and writing skills, and even help them get a better grasp of English grammar. But did you know that reading stories also has one other “hidden” benefit? Stories also help children build character.

Few of us realize how much imagination and the images we feed our minds everyday impact our “moral center” or the place where we make moral choices. You see, we often envision, or imagine, our actions before performing them and actually compare them to the image we have in our heads of what kind of person we want to be. Of course, those images come from many places. For children those images come from adult and peer role models, but they also come from books and movies. All parents hope their children find good role models in the “real” world. As parents and teachers we can also encourage children to find good role models in the “imaginary” world as well.

When children read books they find themselves attracted to and able to identify with certain aspects of the characters. Therefore, they want to be like them. For example, when my students in P5 read the Wizard of Oz, many of them found that they identified with the cowardly lion. After finishing the book, several students shared that the way the cowardly lion overcame his fears to help his friends inspired them to overcome some of their own fears.

Heroes for children to pattern their lives after can be found in all kinds of books. Some students may enjoy reading a biography about a famous person like Einstein. Others may be enthralled by the fantasy world of fairy tales or science fiction. Still others may enjoy reading more life-like stories. The wonderful thing is there are far more good children stories than any child could ever manage to read in a lifetime. Therefore, there are also millions of wonderful heroes waiting to be discovered and millions of great characters waiting to help our children become better people.

As parents and teachers, we can feel great pleasure knowing that the time and money we spend reading to our children and building up our libraries are great investments in our children’s hearts and minds!

宜蘭校區J1 P5 外師  
AlishaMagee