The Book Connection

The Book Connection We supply homeschool related books and materials in South Africa. Including All about Reading and All about Spelling and Life of Fred

We sell All About Reading and All About Spelling in South Africa. Please contact us for more information

There is an idea running underneath The Green Ember that I think about often, mama.The rabbits live in a broken world. T...
30/09/2026

There is an idea running underneath The Green Ember that I think about often, mama.

The rabbits live in a broken world. Their home has fallen. Much has been lost and there is no pretending otherwise — S.D. Smith does not write a comfortable story.

But they hold on to a vision of what they call the Mended Wood. The world as it was meant to be, and as it will one day be again. They work for it, sing about it, and set tables for it before it arrives.

They live now in the light of a world that is coming.

I do not think there is a better description of what we are doing in our homes.

Our children are growing up in a world that is plainly not right. They will find this out. You cannot prevent it and you should not try — a child who has been told everything is fine will not trust you when she discovers it is not.

What you can do is give her stories where the brokenness is real and the mending is also real.

Not stories that pretend. Not stories that despair. Stories that hold both.

That is why the old books last. Narnia has a real winter and a real spring. The Hobbit has a real dragon and a real homecoming. The Green Ember has a real fall and a real Mended Wood.

Children who grow up inside stories like these learn something they cannot be taught directly: that it is possible to look at what is broken without either lying about it or giving up.

Give her the books that hold both, mama.

She is going to need them. 🌿

Five things that make a read-aloud better, mama. All free, all tonight.One. Slow down.Much slower than feels natural. Al...
29/09/2026

Five things that make a read-aloud better, mama. All free, all tonight.

One. Slow down.

Much slower than feels natural. Almost everyone reads aloud too fast. Your child’s ear needs longer than your eye does, and a slower pace makes even a plain sentence sound significant.

Two. Do the voices badly.

You do not need to be good at this. A terrible attempt at a gruff voice is charming and memorable and your children will imitate it for twenty years. Being self-conscious is the only real mistake.

Three. Let them fidget.

Lego, drawing, knitting, lying upside down on the couch. Most children listen better with their hands busy. The child sitting up straight and staring at you is often the one who has stopped following.

Four. Stop mid-scene, not at the end of a chapter.

Close the book at the moment something is about to happen. They will groan. That groan is the sound of a child who wants to read tomorrow.

Five. Do not ask comprehension questions afterwards.

This is the one that matters most. The moment a read-aloud becomes a test, it stops being a gift. If they want to talk about it, they will. If they do not, the story is still doing its work quietly.

Just read, mama. That is the whole method. 🌿

You are four chapters in. You have done the voices. And a child announces, from the floor, that this book is boring.Do n...
28/09/2026

You are four chapters in. You have done the voices. And a child announces, from the floor, that this book is boring.

Do not panic, mama, and do not immediately abandon the book.

“I’m bored” during a read-aloud is almost never about the book.

Most of the time it means one of four things, and each has a different fix.

It means: I do not know what is happening. Long gaps between readings lose the thread. Try a one-line recap before you start — “so last time, Picket had just realised…” — and watch the boredom evaporate.

It means: I have nothing to do with my hands. Many children listen better while building, drawing, or fiddling. A child on the floor with Lego is often listening harder than the one sitting up straight and staring at you.

It means: this is genuinely too hard right now. Not too hard to understand — too hard to care about. Some books need another year. Put it on the shelf and come back.

Or it means: I am tired and hungry and this is the only complaint available to me.

Four things worth trying before you shelve a book: recap first, let them fidget, read at a better time of day, and stop at a cliffhanger rather than the end of a chapter.

Stopping mid-scene is the oldest trick there is. Read to the moment something is about to happen, then close the book.

They will complain. That is how you know it worked.

there is a stack of books somewhere in your house, mama, that you meant to read to your children this year.You bought th...
25/09/2026

there is a stack of books somewhere in your house, mama, that you meant to read to your children this year.

You bought them with real intention. You imagined the evenings. And then the year happened, and the stack sat there, and every time you walked past it you felt something small and heavy.

I want to say two things about that stack.

The first is that every mother has one. Every single one. The mothers whose homes look beautiful on the internet have a stack. I have a stack. It is not evidence of failure; it is evidence that you love books and there are more good books than there is life.

The second is this.

You have not read enough books to your children. Nobody has. There is no quantity at which a mother sits back and thinks: well, that is enough reading aloud, I have completed it.

The measure was never the stack.

The measure is whether your children know what it is to be read to. Whether the sound of your voice reading is somewhere in them. Whether they associate books with warmth rather than with being tested.

If they do — and they do — then you have already done the thing.

Read one chapter tonight, mama. Any book. It does not have to be one from the stack.

The stack will keep. 🌿

24/09/2026

We stop reading aloud far too early, mama.

Usually right around the time a child learns to read independently — which is exactly the wrong moment, because that is when reading becomes work for them and pleasure needs to come from somewhere.

But here is the thing nobody tells you.

A fourteen-year-old will still sit down for a good story.

He will not ask. He will possibly roll his eyes when you suggest it. He will arrange himself at the far end of the couch with his phone in his hand and an expression that says he is only here because he was passing.

He is listening.

Teenagers are hungry for exactly what a read-aloud gives them: undemanding closeness. No eye contact required. No questions about school. No conversation he has to perform in. Just the two of you in a room with a story going.

Some of the best conversations I have had with my older boys started fifteen minutes after I closed a book, about something in it, sideways.

You cannot schedule that. You can only put yourself in the room and read.

Pick something with real weight — Tolkien, a good biography, something with a bit of danger in it. Read fifteen minutes. Do not ask him whether he liked it.

Just do it again tomorrow. 🌿

Why give a comfortable, well-fed, much-loved child stories full of danger, mama?It is a fair question. Our children are ...
23/09/2026

Why give a comfortable, well-fed, much-loved child stories full of danger, mama?

It is a fair question. Our children are safe. They are not going to fight in a war between rabbits. Why fill their heads with battles and betrayals and long odds?

C.S. Lewis answered this better than anyone:

“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

The point is not that your child will need a sword.

The point is that she will need courage, and courage is learned before it is needed.

Somewhere in the years ahead there will be a moment when she has to tell the truth and it will cost her something. A moment when she has to stand alone in a group. A moment when someone she loves is suffering and the only thing she can do is stay.

The child who has spent a hundred evenings inside stories where somebody small does the frightening right thing anyway has a shape in her mind for what that looks like. She has seen it done. She has felt what it costs and what it is worth.

That is not escapism. That is rehearsal.

This is why we read The Green Ember, and Narnia, and the old fairy tales with real wolves in them. Not to frighten our children.

To furnish them. 🌿

Which brave character from a book has stayed with you since childhood, mama?

“My place beside you, my blood for yours. Till the Green Ember rises, or the end of the world.”That is the oath the rabb...
22/09/2026

“My place beside you, my blood for yours. Till the Green Ember rises, or the end of the world.”

That is the oath the rabbits swear in The Green Ember, mama, and my boys have said it to each other across a room more times than I can count.

I have been thinking about why it lodges so deeply in children.

It is not, I think, because children want to swear oaths. It is because they recognise the shape of it.

S.D. Smith writes from a Christian worldview, and it runs all the way through these books. The rabbits live in a broken world, holding on to the promise of the Mended Wood - the world as it was meant to be and will one day be again. They build for it, sing about it, and set tables for it long before it arrives.

And the oath itself is older than the book.

My blood for yours is the shape of the deepest love there is. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Children meet that shape in a story about rabbits, and something in them says yes, not because they have been taught the theology, but because they were made for it. They are recognising, in a small and safe way, something that is actually true about the world.

That is what good stories do. They do not replace what we teach our children. They prepare the ground for it.

So when my boys say it to each other across a room, half-joking, with swords made of sticks, I do not hear children playing at vows.

I hear children who have been handed the shape of self-giving love, and who liked how it felt.

They will meet it again, later, in a much bigger story.

And they will already know what it sounds like. 🌿

Here is something that changes how you choose read-alouds, mama.Your child’s listening vocabulary is years ahead of her ...
21/09/2026

Here is something that changes how you choose read-alouds, mama.

Your child’s listening vocabulary is years ahead of her reading vocabulary.

She can understand, follow, and love a book that is far beyond what she could decode on her own. This stays true for most of childhood — the two only really meet somewhere in the early teens.

Which means the book you read aloud should be harder than the book she reads herself.

Most of us do the opposite. We hand the child a hard book to read alone because she “should be stretching herself”, and then we read something easy aloud because it is bedtime and we are tired.

Turn it around.

Let her independent reading be comfortable. Easy, even. Let her read the books she can gallop through, because fluency is built by volume and enjoyment, not by struggle.

And save the stretching for your voice.

Read her the book with the long sentences and the difficult words and the ideas she is not quite ready for. She will understand more than you expect, because you are there — with your voice doing the work of decoding, and your presence making the hard parts safe.

This is how a six-year-old comes to love a story written for a ten-year-old. And it is why children who are read to well end up with vocabularies that seem to come from nowhere.

Read up, mama. She can take it. 🌿

You have hit a wall, mama.The same lesson, three days running. She had it on Monday. On Wednesday it is gone. You are st...
18/09/2026

You have hit a wall, mama.
The same lesson, three days running. She had it on Monday. On Wednesday it is gone. You are starting
to wonder whether you should push through, or whether something is wrong, or whether you are
simply bad at this.
Here is what to do.
Go back.
Go back to the last thing she knew cold — properly cold, effortlessly, no hesitation — and start forward
again from there. It might be two lessons back. It might be ten. It does not matter.
This feels like losing ground. It is the opposite.
A wall almost always means something earlier was not quite solid. She got through it, more or less, on a
good day. And then two lessons later the shaky foundation ran out of strength and everything built on
top of it wobbled.
You cannot fix that by pushing harder at the top. You fix it by going back to the last solid ground.
Children move very fast through material they have already met. Going back ten lessons might cost you
a week. Pushing through a wall can cost you a term, and it can cost your child her confidence, which is
much harder to rebuild than a phonogram.
Going back is not failure, mama.
It is what good teachers do. 🌿

17/09/2026

“She knows every single letter sound. She still cannot read a word.”
If you have said this, mama, you are not imagining it and your child is not being difficult.
You have found the blending gap.
Knowing the sounds and blending the sounds are two different skills, and almost nobody tells you that.
Your child can look at c, a and t and tell you /c/ /a/ /t/ perfectly. Then she looks at you blankly, because
she cannot yet hear that those three sounds, run together, make a word she already knows.
The sounds are in her head as three separate things. They have not yet become one thing.
Three things that help:
Slide the sounds instead of saying them separately. Not “/c/ /a/ /t/“ but “/ccccaaaat/“, stretched out,
no gaps. The gaps are what she cannot get across.
Start with two sounds, not three. “At.” “It.” “Am.” Build up.
Use continuous sounds first — m, s, f, l, n, r — because they can be held. Stop sounds like /t/ and /p/
are much harder to stretch.
This is exactly what a structured programme does for you, in order, without you having to work it out at
the kitchen table at eight in the morning.
How Reading Actually Works • The Book Connection
The gap is real. It is normal. And it closes. 🌿

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