This book is a must have for parents!
I might have written about this book before, but I feel so strongly about it that I wanted to blog about it again. I have always been a big reader and have routinely read to my children, but I have taken it to another level since reading this book several years ago. Read the info. below and pick-up the book. I never reread books, but I think I might be reading this one again.
Also, check out Jim Trelease's website at,
www.trelease-on-reading.com
Below is an excerpt from the web site:
This is not a book about teaching a child how to read; it’s about teaching a child to want to read. There's an education adage that goes, “What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.” The fact is that some children learn to read sooner than others, and some better than others. There is a difference. For the parent who thinks sooner is better, who has an eighteen-month-old child barking at flashcards, my response is: Sooner is not better. Are the dinner guests who arrive an hour early better guests than those who arrive on time? Of course not.
However, I am concerned about the child who needlessly arrives late and then struggles through years of pain with a book. Not only will he miss out on large portions of what he needs to know in school, he'll experience a pain connection with print that may stay with him for a lifetime. There are things that families must do as "preventive maintenance" to ensure against those pains.
Even I have to admit that the subject of children's reading is broader than simply reading aloud to children, passionate as I am about that subject. And that's why there's a chapter (
five) devoted to SSR—sustained silent reading, reading aloud's silent partner, if you will. And just as the best baseball players come from countries and states where they can play baseball most often, research shows that children who have access to more print (magazines, newspapers, and books) have higher reading scores—because they end up reading more. That's explored in chapter
seven.
There is also a chapter on television (
nine), including some new research correlating infants' daily TV exposure with attention deficit disorder by age seven. That chapter also includes information about a mechanical device for the TV that is the most successful reading tutor in the world!
Questions covered in the Introduction for print edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook:
- What if the No Child Left Behind Act is wrong? Where does that leave the nation’s children?
- Are you suggesting this reading stuff is the job of the parent?
- Can we really change families and homes in America?
- Will this book help me teach my child to read?
- How did a parent come to write this book?
- How do I convince my husband he should be doing this with our children?
- Is reading still important in the video age?
The Thanksgiving holiday is over. My daughter came home from college for the first time since the semester started. We watched movies, played board and card games together, colored (those adult coloring pages!), and generally relaxed. I got some reading in my Lewis & Clark books done. (They have reached the Gates of the Mountains in present day Montana.) It was a really nice break. We did venture out to Target on Saturday--we could not resist the lure of the book section, but that was about it. I did do some on-line shopping (hey, I'm a busy working mom, I had to get it done), but didn't go out Thursday night/Friday early.