The Reading Bug … and how you can help your child to catch it

This book by Paul Jennings is beautiful. The illustrations (ok, comics) by Andrew Weldon are gorgeous.

The book is basically about how parents (and teachers, but mainly parents) can help their children learn to enjoy reading. But it is also, particularly in a couple of the later chapters, about how authors (and editors, illustrators and publishers, but mainly authors) of children's books can create books that children want to read, that children will enjoy reading—hopefully, again and again and again.

It also talks a little about the relationship between teaching children to read and teaching children to talk, a subject close to my heart as a Suzuki music student and teacher. Now a maths teacher, I feel further challenged by this. If maths is a language (and I believe it is), then I seriously need to think about the relationships between first-language learning and how I teach maths.