A children's book club online

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/26/guardian-childrens-booksite
As the Guardian launches a children-only reading website, books editor Claire Armitstead writes about the importance of older children reading to their smaller brothers and sisters

• Claire Armitstead
• The Guardian, Saturday 26 February 2011
• Article history

Reading a book together. Photograph: Jamie Grill/Iconica

At eight and five, my children were were bitten by the Animorphs bug. For years thereafter, almost every conversation included some reference to KA Applegate's science-fiction bestiary of brain-infiltrating Yeerks, scorpion-tailed Andalites and morphing children. It made parties easy – they were all staged in Epping forest and involved gaggles of shrieking children running around as lions, bears and newts, and trying to keep as far away as possible from parental yeerks.

I remember it all vividly because I wrote about it for the Guardian just before becoming literary editor and suffered weeks of snide comments about what it revealed about my literary taste. "But they're so badly written," said one publisher, to which I could only reply that writing style was not the point. Their value, to my sprawling, extended family, was to provide an imaginative space that could be shared between four children, of both sexes, with a four-year age gap between the eldest and the youngest. Adult ideas of what constituted good writing didn't come into it.

At the same time as my tribe were careering around Epping forest, researchers at Goldsmiths College were studying reading habits among siblings in Tower Hamlets, east London, with particular reference to Bangladeshi families. Their findings offered such a powerful challenge to the view that home reading is an activity that takes place between parent and child that it is still widely cited 10 years on. They found that older siblings played a key role in mediating school reading with life in families where the parents often didn't speak English, let alone read it.

When you think of the resource that older friends or siblings represent, it seems astonishing that child-to-child reading gets so little attention. An older sibling stands outside the triangle of school, parent and child: someone to be looked up to and emulated rather than obeyed. And in a culture with many different models of what family means – from tight circles of friends, to single-parent units, to stepfamilies generations apart – other children become even more valuable. It's with this in mind that the Guardian is launching a children-only books website on 3 March, World Book Day, with three reading "zones": seven and under, eight to 12 and 13-plus. The content of the site will be decided by children themselves, starting with the 100 young readers from all over the world who are already signed up to curate it. For feedback on reading for the smallest kids we'll be relying entirely on older "children" either to remember and pass on their own favourites or to report what the younger generation like.

This doesn't seem such a big thing to ask to the poet and broadcasterMichael Rosen, who refers to his large family as "tiered". "My offspring in their 20s and 30s can and do read to the under-10s or, better still, make the Lego kits and pull out of old cupboards their secret caches of old Beanos from the 1980s."

The idea of a children-only reading space is familiar to Simon and Alex Scarrow, both of whom are about to publish their own latest novels for young people. Simon, whose Gladiator is the first of a new series set in ancient Rome, fondly remembers mealtimes discussing the latest in science fiction or horror. A big Graham Masterton phase began when Alex, the youngest of three brothers, came home with The Devils of D-Day. "It was pretty gruesome," says Simon. "We'd discuss how we were going to take it forward, and we'd write our own stories and put film scripts together. There was no crossover at all between our reading and what our parents read."

Alex, author of the award-winning Time Riders series, says: "Being the youngest, I learned through Simon and Scott about the really cool books. They were my quality filters."

For Louisa Young, half of the mother-daughter writing partnership Zizou Corder, the difference between her childhood as the fifth of six children, and her daughter's as an only child, is marked. "The great luxury was the summer holiday, when my two-years-older brother and I were taken to Foyles to choose six paperbacks between us. The squabbles, negotiations, fights and piles of selections all over the floor of the shop took up all afternoon.

"I have one child, which makes it simpler, and our bedtime stories led to us writing five books together. But I still love being in the middle of a big pile of children, with a book or a good idea."

Meg Rosoff, author of seven novels including How I Live Now, also came from a big family of four girls: "My mother loved reading to my three sisters and me. My older sister – by one year – and I shared all our books for years. But by the time I was old enough to go to the library by myself, things changed. Books became more individual and private. I read every pony book ever written and she moved on from animals to love. Yuck."

If a parent is a great reader does not guarantee that their children will be too, as Rosoff points out. "I started reading to my daughter when she was tiny. Because of computers and all the rest, and possibly because I owned the territory of reader and writer, my daughter has so far not become the voracious reader I was."

Anxiety about the effect of computers on children's reading is one of the big themes of our age. But, for sharers like the Scarrow brothers, new technology would have made their reading lives even richer. "We'd have killed to have video and the other resources that children have today," says Simon.

The Children's booksite launches on Thursday 3 March, World Book Day, on guardian.co.uk/books