I have a friend who loves talking about reading with children as much as I do. She has voracious readers in her house and she comes to me often to report on books that her girls have loved and to brainstorm ideas for new titles to add to their shelves. And then sometimes, she sends me great literacy-related information.

I knew I was in luck last week when I opened an e-mail from her titled, “Interesting article regarding teaching kids to read.”

The article, published in the journal Child Development, states something slightly alarming.

Research has found that simply reading aloud to children is not all it takes to turn them in to good readers. Discussing the story isn’t enough either. And neither is asking questions about the story.

Gulp.

Research finds, in fact, that adults need to draw children’s attention to the print on the page in order for read alouds to positively impact later independent reading.

I know that many people do this without realizing what they are doing. Some people point word to word when the text is big. Others draw children’s attention to words that start with the same letter as their names. Some move their finger across the line of text marking left to right movement. I do all of these things but not all the time. A reminder is a good thing.

Click here to read a summary of the article or… if the end of the school year craziness hasn’t gotten you, the full reference for this fascinating article is… Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., & Kaderavek, J. N. (2012). Increasing young children’s contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810–820.

 

 

 

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I learned two things today.

One… It is very hard to take a good picture of someone else’s feet.

Two… Time is moving too quickly.

The shoes above are mine. The feet are Caroline’s.

My little baby wore my flip flops to school today.

The feet that wore my flip flops today, once grew inside my belly. They were so little, that, for what felt like a long time, we could hold them in the palm of our hands. And now in the blink of an eye, my little girl can wear my shoes.

Today I vow to pay more attention. To slow down. To breathe. To appreciate. To live. So that in doing so, I can slow down time, if only a little bit…

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I try my hardest not to dance in front of others but today I have to admit to doing a happy dance at a book fair.

The girls have their Spring book fair at school this week and I was thrilled with the selection. There were many, many books appropriate for early readers. These are toughest types of books for parents to buy so seeing so many of them in one place was awfully exciting.

One of my favorites was Gus Makes a Gift , the tale of a rhino who heads off to school to make a mother’s day gift. Using few and simple words, Frank Remkiewicz (illustrator of the Froggy books) is able to convey a story that is both interesting and truly readable for early readers.

So now you can only imagine what happened when I got home and discovered that Gus has a series of books. Maybe, just maybe, there was a little more dancing…

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I have a list of things that I will start doing someday. Someday when I have more time. You know the list. I’m pretty sure we all have one. Mine includes filling photo albums, eating more dark leafy greens and reading the newspaper.

Fortunately, until that day comes, Rob helps me with one of my ‘someday’ items. Whenever he reads an article in the paper that he thinks I would like, he puts it on my desk.

The other day, I came downstairs to find The New York Times Sports section sitting on my lap top. The article was “Tuck Shares His Love of Reading.” The blurb indicated that the article would be about the children’s book that the Giant’s Jason Tuck had recently written. I was about to begin my lecture on celebrity authors and how Rob did not need to save these articles, when I continued reading.

Yes. The article promotes Tuck’s book and his charity, RUSH (Read, Understand, Succeed and Hope). But it is more than that.

It is the story of a family that values reading. A family that goes to the library together. A family that talks about their time reading to their babies from the moment they were born and even before. Parents that remember their favorite books from childhood. Tuck was partial to “Cat in the Hat”, “Green Eggs and Ham” and the “Arthur” series.

And it is the story of a family that really gets it.

The article reads,

“I like to think we’re pretty amazing parents,” Tuck said, laughing, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard sometimes. There are lots of decisions to talk about and issues to figure out. But we know that reading is where it starts. We know that for sure.”

Now this is one celebrity author that might just be the real deal…

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Sometimes people (and by people, I might mean myself) worry that their children are reading ‘below their level’.

Why is she reading something so easy?

Why is she re-reading?

Why isn’t she challenging herself?

Last week, I had gum surgery to repair my poor receding gums. For the past few days, I’ve been in a bit of pain and in a lot of hunger. Believe it or not, a diet of ice cream can get old. But I digress.

During these past few days, I have craved comfort reading in the same way that I am craving comfort food.

Is a Shakespearean play on my reading level? Probably. Is that what I have chosen to read. Certainly not.

I read Stay Close by Harlan Coben. A book that some might say is way below my reading level. A book that did not challenge my reading skills.

And in doing so, I read a page turner. A book that kept me up way too late last night because I just had to know what happened. A book that makes me want to read another Harlan Coben book. A book that makes me want to keep on reading.

I will remind myself of this book the next time I sigh while watching Caroline read an easy book and remind myself that she is reading.

She is reading and that’s what counts.

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I needed a statistic this week for an article I am writing. I turned to a fascinating book, Creating Lifelong Readers Through Independent Reading, to find it and found the numbers I needed and more.

I was searching for the decline in ‘reading for pleasure’ seen over the years. But don’t fear-the story I was writing was not a sad one. As frequent readers of this blog know, there is an easy solution for this decline. Reading aloud and independent reading.

But just to share these alarming stats…

The 2001 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an assessment of reading comprehension and reading habits of fourth graders in 35 countries (including the United States), found the following trends:

• Only 35% of U.S. fourth graders reported reading for fun daily.
• An average of 40% of fourth graders internationally read for fun daily.
• Thirty-two percent of U.S. fourth graders reported never reading fun outside of school.
• An average of 18% of international fourth graders never read for fun outside of school.

Now as a life-long reader, this is clearly alarming just because it is.

But lack of reading for fun has significant ramifications educationally as well. Again, it’s simple. The more you read, the easier reading is for you. The easier reading is for you, the more you want to read. And so it goes…

Again found in Creating Lifelong Readers Through Independent Reading, Cunnningham and Stanovich state in their article for American Educator, What Reading Does for the Mind  

A child who reads abundantly develops greater reading skills, a larger vocabulary, and more general knowledge about the world. In return [the child has] increased reading comprehension and, therefore, enjoys more pleasurable reading experiences and is encouraged to read even more.

So in case you were looking for more reasons to stack those bedtime tables with more summer reading books, there you go…

 

 

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It might have been a bedtime-delaying tactic. But I’ll take it. You see, Katherine and I just spent a good fifteen minutes playing a spontaneous alphabet game.

We are in the middle of the latest in our favorite series, Gooney Bird on the Map. During our reading tonight, Gooney Bird and her classmates matched the first initial of their names to the names of the states. Keiko to Kansas. Malcom to Massachusetts. Felicia Ann to Florida.

You can guess where this is going.

Katherine began to name classmates as fast as I could name the matching state. Then she wanted to do colors and days of the week and so on and so on and so on.

As I say often, giving our children the gift of literacy can be so simple. Nothing to buy. Nothing to make. Just a book and a little bit of time…

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I was talking with a neighbor this morning about the amazing-ness of her two year old twins. Born at 32 weeks, each weighing under four pounds, they show no developmental signs of their early beginnings.

When I asked my neighbor why she thought they were doing so remarkably well she said, “Well, we read to them all the time.”

Now, this is a relatively new neighbor who didn’t know what I did, so I promise this was not a plant.

And then she went on… She told me that parents in the twins’ nursery school class often comment on how verbal her children are. When she tells these parents, “Well, we read to them all the time.”, the other parents will often say, “Gosh, we really need to start doing that.”

Start doing that!? These are parents of two year old children.

Our country has acknowledged (while not doing much about it) that children in our urban districts need literacy support.

Often their parents are working multiple jobs leaving little time to be home reading. Often there is barely enough money to put food on the table never mind books on the bookshelves. Often their public libraries and school libraries have been closed because of ridiculous budget cuts. We know the struggles of these families.

We either have not acknowledged or are too embarrassed to talk about the fact that the children in our suburban districts need literacy support too.

Their parents may also be working multiple jobs leaving little time to be home reading. Or their children are enrolled in so many sports and activities that any time at home is needed for homework, eating and sleep. Often while there is plenty of money to be spent on books, that money is going elsewhere. Often these parents leave literacy support to the schools, knowing that their child is getting an excellent education and assuming that a love of reading will come hand in hand with their time at school.

So yes, even here. We need to think about our children’s literacy development. Even here…

 

 

 

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Something funny is happening in our house.

Katherine is beginning to say, “That’s a boring book.”

At first I panicked. Initially, I couldn’t figure out what was and what wasn’t. Sometimes they were old favorites and sometimes brand new titles she hadn’t seen before. Sometimes they were based in reality and sometimes they were totally silly. Sometimes they were well illustrated and sometimes not.

And then I figured it out. They were all concept books. Books that told a simple story but were essentially about something else. Be it rhyming or patterns or numbers. The boring books were not telling involved stories. There wasn’t character development or a true plot. There was no conflict and resolution.

I know this is a phase and despite being a great big six year old, these books will again be fun but for now, they are not.

Katherine is a reader on a mission. A mission to understand characters and setting and story. And I will accept this mission gladly.

Off to make a library list…

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With summer approaching and fear of the summer slide settling in, I am getting lots of questions about how to help young readers.

Sometimes, I think people are looking for the perfect answer. Some type of magical response that can only come from a specialist. Something that they, as parents are missing.

In fact, the answer couldn’t be simpler.

When I stumbled on the above while browsing Facebook yesterday, I immediately asked for permission to post the picture.

Sometimes, I think words can be heard so often, it’s easy to ignore them. A picture though, really is worth a thousand words. Sorry for the cliche… couldn’t be helped.

If you are looking for a visual of how to help a young reader in your life, look above.

Read aloud. Listen. Talk. And read again.

And if you don’t believe me, listen to this.

In 1985 the government commissioned the report, Becoming a Nation of Readers, to examine the state of literacy education in the country and to determine best instructional practices. This report continues to be the gold standard today.

And do you know what all their fancy research showed?

It showed exactly the same thing as the picture above..

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.

The single most important and the single most simple thing are one in the same.

Let’s celebrate that fact by finding our favorite book and our favorite child and reading. That is all…

 

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