Weaving the web

No single experience has given me more pleasure these last weeks than reading Charlotte's Web out loud to the whole group.  After many readings through my years with children, it remains for me the perfect first chapter book.   Charlotte and Wilbur never fail to weave a spell of pleasure, discovery, and joy in the hearts of the children who are listening.  And the book never fails to move me too, with its language, its subtleties, and its depth of feeling.

Tomorrow we will read "The Last Day," at the end of which Charlotte dies.   The rumors have been floating, because a couple kids have apparently seen a movie version (I have sworn them to silence.)   We will share the sadness of this part of the story together.  Two or three more days, and the last page will be finished, the book closed, the circle of life celebrated as Charlotte's baby spiders take off on a warm wind.

I wish you could see your children's faces as I read to them.  In the past I have read this book to 5- and 6-year-olds; here in our group, only the two youngest tend to drift away.  They sit rapt on our "story rug" (the carpet next to the sensorial shelves).   Their eyes are watching me, they rarely move, and I know that inside, they are conjuring the story's images for themselves; they are soaking up the language and the feelings.  The chapters are just right in length - sometimes we read just half a chapter, sometimes we skip a day.  The vocabulary is rich and interesting (thank you, Charlotte, who is among other things quite literate!)  There are only the occasional, classic Garth Williams line drawings to stimulate their visual imagination.  Every day we talk about what happened the day before.  Today we laughed and laughed at the funny happenings at the Fair. Sometimes I re-read parts, or a whole chapter to a child who missed it.  It's part of our breathing in and breathing out, for a few more days.

What is its magic?    Here is what Eudora Welty wrote about Charlotte's Web: "What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time.  As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done."  All of this in a children's book.  All of this and more.

What is its magic?  Perhaps at its core it's friendship, which dwells at the heart of your children's daily lives.  Tomorrow, and forever, Charlotte will say to Wilbur, in her last hours of life, "You have been my friend.  That in itself is a tremendous thing."