I don’t know how many of you may have read Pinocchio, I just know that my familiarity with the story came from the Disney movie. I was slightly reacquainted with characters while watching the end of the first season of Once Upon A Time (the tv show). I know I had never read the story myself, and I don’t recall anyone ever reading the story to me as a child. My daughter normally has story time with her father. This evening my husband was busy with something else he needed to complete before tomorrow, so I became drafted into reading or telling her a story.
I had recently reformatted a public domain copy of Pinocchio with clean, clear illustrations. My original thoughts when I was working with the book, was that my husband could use it for evening story time. According to her reading preferences he’s often re-reading old favorites, or the Boxcar Children series. All of these she’s well able to read for herself, often she’ll read farther along in the Boxcar Children book while he’s not home or even finish it but still sit and listen to him read it chapter by chapter.
I’m not sure what exactly caused me to start the book with her, perhaps it was her instance that someone read to her no matter what. Perhaps it was the fact that I know our current copy of Pinocchio will most likely have a number of OCR errors what will have to be corrected yet. But what ever the reason, I told her that if I was going to read tonight, I picked the story. My daughter who wants to control all things around her, wanted to know if she didn’t like the story would we still have to read the entire book. We then agreed that she’d have to at least listen to a few chapters before she could say she didn’t like it and stop the reading of the book.
I read her the first chapter tonight, and she seems very interested in the book. She gave me a thumbs up when we were done reading, and said we’ll need to continue the book. So we certainly will continue on.
I’m not sure what it is exactly but for a very long time, I wasn’t interested in reading “the classics”. Often mentioning the classics made want to either hug my pleasure reading books closer or run away and hide. Perhaps it was “the classics” I was asked to read in school. Perhaps I just wasn’t interested in more than reading for my own enjoyment. I’m not sure, I just know that any of the classics I had been asked to read I didn’t enjoy. I seem to remember liking Tom Sawyer, but I also seem to recall choosing to read it on my own.
When she was younger, I was not able to read to my daughter. I read in the neighborhood of 200-250 wpm (words per minute) and when I first tried to read picture books to her I found it extremely difficult to slow down enough to do so. I also found that books that didn’t make sense drove me nuts; which meant it was impossible for me to read Dr. Seuss Books to her. It took years for me to relearn how to slow down enough to read aloud, but I finally did. (Now the only problem I have with story books are different voices for the different characters, still not great with that.)
So having said all that why did I choose Pinocchio? Well, it’s listed in the Ambleside Online Curriculum Year 1 as one of their suggested additional free reads. (There are several others as well, and as time permits I may reformat some of them as well.) After having said all that I will share with you, my illustrated version of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi in either epub or mobi. (Please be assured that I will be correcting any errors I find as I go along, and will be uploading corrected versions when we are finished reading the book.)