Tell Me: Children, Reading & Talk - with The Reading Environment

By Aidan Chambers
Published by Thimble Press 2011 (combined volume)
The Reading Environment first published 1991
Tell Me: Children, Reading & Talk first published 1993
ISBN: 9780903355544
218 pages
296gms

Pie says:
"There is no better book about developing readers. It is an essential read for anyone interested in developing a dialogic approach to reading. Inspiring, illuminating and packed with practical insight into reading and teaching. For me, this has always been the guiding light."

How adults help children talk well about books.

“In any group of children we find that if they begin by sharing their most obvious observations they soon accumulate a body of understanding that reveals the heart of a text and its meaning(s) for them all. Even when quite complicated or abstract ideas are approached this way (through story images and talked-out interpretations) there is little that children cannot grasp."

Tell Me shows this happening and offers practitioner-based advice and information about developing booktalk in the classroom.

Companion to Tell Me, and originally published separately from it, The Reading Environment describes, with practical examples, the surroundings and attitudes that support children's encounters with books in school, enabling them to become thoughtful, willing writers.

Aidan Chambers writes novels, plays and literary criticism. His Postcards from No Man's Land received the Carnegie Medal and the Michael L. Printz Award. The Hans Christian Andersen Medal for the body of his work went to him in 2002. In 2010 he received the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) award for Lifetime Services to English Education. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.