To Honor Anna Dewdney, Read To A Child

Llama Llama series writer and illustrator Anna Dewdney died this month, and, in passing, she did something pretty remarkable. As it says in her Publishers Weekly obituary (which was picked up by the Washington Post),

She requested that in lieu of a funeral service that people read to a child instead.

That's a beautiful legacy. Go do it, now.

And after you've read to a young person in your life, take a moment and read this powerful piece Anna wrote a few years ago that was published in the Wall Street Journal, How Books Can Teach Your Child To Care, on how reading builds not just empathy, but human beings.

It includes these lines,

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I will go further and say that that child then learns to feel the world more deeply, becoming more aware of himself and others in a way that he simply cannot experience except in our laps, or in our classrooms, or in our reading circles.

Thank you, Anna.

Illustrate and Write, and Read to A Child On,
Lee