Once upon a time I worked as a Head Start teacher. My favorite part of the day was Storytime. Not because it was quiet — it rarely was — but because something amazing happened when I opened a book. Those wiggly little humans, who couldn’t sit still for anything else, would suddenly lean in. After a page or two, the room softened. They listened. They watched. Sometimes they even tried to read ahead of me, and that was perfectly fine. They were reading.
And then came my favorite part — the blurting. No hand-raising, no waiting their turn, just pure, honest connection:
“Hey, I do that!” “I don’t like that either!” “That’s like my brother!”
They weren’t just hearing the story. They were entering it. They were finding themselves in the characters, the problems, the silliness, the feelings. That was the revolution for me — the moment picture books stopped being just words on a page and became bridges.
I started reading differently. I stopped performing the text and started telling the story. I asked open-ended questions. I let them question me, question the characters, question the choices. We planned activities together. We followed threads from the story into our day. They discovered joy because the stories weren’t separate from them, and I discovered joy because I wasn’t only teaching literacy —I was teaching self-awareness and connection.
And that is why I write for children.