Story Time: Room On The Broom
For my first post I wanted to think of how I could help people, or inspire people or something profound about parenting and being a dad but I decided I’d dedicate my first post on this blog to one of my favourite times of day and one of my favourite dad tasks – bed time and story time. This will become a bit of a regular feature on here, Story Time, where I intend to talk about the book we read, NJ’s reaction to it and why we like it so much. Some of them will be well known, maybe classics and some not so much but we’ll see.
Story time for us usually takes place on the rocking chair in the nursery with NJ drinking a bottle of milk.
Tonight was no different but the story tonight was Julia Donaldson’s brilliant Room On The Broom. We must have read this together so many times over the last 6 months or so but it just doesn’t get tired or old or boring. In fact NJ’s appreciation of it increased tonight in a few choice areas!
I love reading to NJ and try to inject some interest, emotion, action etc into my voice when I do, all with the consideration that I want him to actually start to wind down and get a bit sleepy so I try not to overdo it at this time!
One of our favourite bits in the book tonight was when the dragon makes an appearance – “I am a dragon, as fierce as can be, and I’m planning to have witch and chips for my tea”. Tonight I decided to roar at this point, which NJ loved and started roaring back at me over the course of the next couple of pages.
My next favourite part tonight was the witches spell after seeing off the dragon – “Iggety, Ziggety, Zaggety, ZOOM!” Again NJ loved this and gave me his version of the spell in words that sounded nothing like those I just read but had as much intention and enthusiasm a 1 year old can produce with a bottle in his mouth!
So there you have it – Room On The Broom by Julia Donaldson, a brilliant book with some great characters along with some great opportunities to get your little one involved! NJ loves roaring and I suspect we’re going to see some spell casting coming soon too.
Have you read Room On The Broom? What do you think? What are your favourite parts? What does your little one think to it? Go dig it out and have a read right now.
I love this story. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read it to Kathryn since I discovered it a few months ago. She loves to do the ‘Down cried the witch’ and ‘Woosh! They were gone’ parts…oh and ‘Witch and Chips’ is a given.