Yoda at Story-Time

Women complain that men are unfathomable. Men say that women are incomprehensible. Until this past year, I didn’t know that there are people on the planet even more enigmatic than adults of the opposite sex. I had this revelation when I realized that somehow many children turn into Yoda while being read a story.

Part of my work involves reading stories to children who are ages birth-third grade. One of the missions for the project is that we should make stories engaging, so we ask questions so they feel more connected to the story. Since we work with big groups of kids, up to 35, so we try to ask yes or no questions to keep the comments from straying off topic. It’s during these questions that I begin to wish that there was a child psychologist present.

I’ll give you a few examples:

-Reading a book about a child imagining himself as animals, the reader gets to a part of the story in which the boy imagines himself as a cat who helps around the house. She asked " Do any of you have cats who help around the house?" Most kids say no, but one child’s response is " I used to have a cat named Fluffy. And the neighbors had a dog. I don’t have Fluffy anymore, because the dog next door ate her. But I didn’t see it."

- When I read Harold and the Purple Crayon to a group of preschoolers, I asked them if they knew how Harold fell in the water (He was scared, and drew a wavy line.) This somehow prompted one of the little girls to tell me that she and her family when to Disneyland on a plane at Christmas time.

- In another book we read about animals in the African Savanna. A question about giraffes lead to one boy telling us about how he broke his arm last year.

- We do a survey at the end of the summer program, so I wrote the responses for a first grader. I asked her if there were any types of arts projects she’d like to do next summer that we hadn’t done, like work with clay or tie-dye clothes. She thought hard about it and said " We should have swimming."

- I asked one of the little boys if he liked his snack. He nodded and said " If you get kidnapped and you die, you go straight to heaven. And if someone is a kidnapper, they go to hell and burn in a lake of fire forever."

No one minds the responses, unless they get to be really disruptive, but as one of my co-workers said " You just want to ask them ‘how did you get there from what I asked you?’ because it’d be really neat to figure out how they think." I’d love to figure that out too, since these responses are even more fascinating than the moral judgements they make on the characters in the story, and the leaps of logic they make to explain what happens. The only thing that I can come up with is that they take being asked a question as an opportunity to tell you anything, and not necessarily anything that relates to what you’re asking. That’s one of the most interesting things about working with little kids, you never know what’s going to come out of their mouths next.