“The wonderful wizard of Oz” was one of my favourite stories growing up. I still carry with me bits and pieces of its dramatised version for radio/vinyl in Romanian and have been singing its song about the yellow brick road to little gosling to sleep. I’ve long wanted to share the story with him and I finally decided to do it when he showed a strong and persistent interest in tornadoes

It’s retold in a simple fashion, a bit abruptly, but totally easy to follow for my 3 years and a half old, without it being too poor in language. Little gosling has been totally fascinated by the words “cellar”, “twister”, “booming” and “scrub”:)); he keeps asking me every time about their meaning and then runs to ask his daddy “daddy, did you know that….?” 

The whole page spread out illustrations help a lot with the understanding of the text and have captivated his attention. The tornado, the witches and the wizard, the flying monkeys (“we all know monkeys can’t fly, but these ones do”), Oz’s giant head screen and megaphone (“to make the booming voice”) are elements on which we dwell quite a lot each time we read it.. Which is pretty much every night for more than a week, already.

I get lots of “why” questions: why do they have to go in a cellar? Why does Dorothy live with her uncle and aunt? Where is her granny? Why is her uncle called Henry? And so on…We talk about emotions and what each of the characters experiences in different situations, particularly who gets scared of what. Dorothy and Toto look quite fearless. He also has me singing “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz” from the movie several times :))).

Can’t wait to read the original story and watch the move with him when he grows a bit older! 

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Until such time we go to the forest (one without mean wolves!!!, only with friendly wolves) to pick up sticks and twigs to make our own witch broom and wand, he runs around the house in complete outfit: our (much smaller and different, imperfect-looking) broom; a big bucket for a cauldron; one of his daddy’s fancy hats, almost invariably covering half his face; and a spatula for a wand It’s cute, albeit a bit anxiety-inducing :))) seeing him ride the broom up and down the living room and struggling to hold everything together, just  like the witch in the story. 

The wonderfully catchy rhyme (one of those that stick inadvertently and definitively onto your cortex) goes about the witch losing some of her items, one after the other. As she does, she repays the animals who help her get them back by taking them on her broom. Until… the broom snaps in two!!! A chase ensues, with a dragon and a terrible four-headed monster involved. But the story has a happy ending! The witch gets to show she can do magic, when all her gratefulness translates into a plane comfortable-like broom. 

A truly engaging read-aloud, it is fast-paced, full of suspense, loud, scary, funny, happy. Little gosling has fun reproducing all the sounds in the book. I love his shrieks and croaks :)). He never lets me forget going in a lower, scary voice for the dragon and gets so excited with the jumping; the one that gets the broom to break and the jumps for joy at seeing the newly refurbished broom. He’s truly fascinated by the cauldron and he uses his most mysterious tone to recite the witch’s spell: iggety ziggety…..

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