Admittedly, if your intelligent children read Harry Potter on their own, they will laugh and enjoy it. Nevertheless, however intelligent, they are still children and may need your help to figure out such things as that the book is teaching them to control their imaginations. For instance, as they are reading or hearing, they are actually forming an image of the boggart in their minds and adding the amusing accessories. With a little explanation from you, they will be smart enough to recognize that they can do the same to the fears in their lives: they can imagine them as comic or perhaps just going farther away so that they become dim and small. There is no end to what they can do with controlled minds, yet this control is but one of the countless skills they can acquire from books--with your help.

Probably, you already know the main point of reading to children--use the book to talk to them--but this is such an important idea that it deserves a bit of thought. Every instant that you perform a book, you are teaching something. As the narrator, you are the voice of authority. As the characters, doing high and low pitched voices, accents, slow drawling ones, and ones as fast as auctioneers, you prove that you can be trusted to adapt to different situations. You are inspiring your children to model themselves on that ability, a practice that will sensitize their ears to understand tone, speed, volume, and all the other sonic effects that cannot fit on the printed page. They learn to use these, and--since they are intelligent, this knowledge eventually enriches their reading when they are alone.