From Reader to Writer: Teaching Writing Through Classic Children's Books

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This delightful book for readers and writers of nearly all ages is also
an innovative guide for parents and teachers who aim to encourage
children to write. Sarah Ellis’s inspiration comes from great books
for children, old and new, and from the lives and experience of those
who wrote them. Her biographical and literary sources are drawn from
Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Ransom, J.R. Tolkien, Beatrix Potter,
Lewis Carroll, L.M. Montgomery, Monica Hughes, Paul Yee, Jean Little,
and many others.

In an introduction, “On Learning to Write,” Ellis notes opposing
theories such as risk taking, apprenticeship, or group learning. She
also notes that in her research of the essays, journals, letters, and
autobiographies of these classic children’s writers, all were great
readers (Ellis includes information on what they read) and all found
pleasure in writing, in “the freedom, exhilaration and deep
satisfaction of finding just the right words.” In her second
introductory chapter, “How to Use This Book,” Ellis offers
guidelines for classes or workshops. Sixteen subsequent chapters on 17
classic children’s writers link their books to their lives and
idiosyncrasies, with intriguing anecdotes and illustrations. For
example, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit began, like many
famous children’s books, as a story for a specific child: “She tried
to please her audience and she wrote about things that mattered to her.
Good advice for a letter writer. Good advice for any writer.”

Ellis moves easily from specific biographical examples to general
advice on writing well. From Reader to Writer is an unusual book for
older children or adults, and an excellent one. Highly recommended.