"Education is not the filling of a bucket but
the lighting of a fire."
—William Butler Yeats
"Do you have a free
handout about reading
that we can give parents at our school?"
o many
teachers and administrators asked Jim Trelease that
question, one of his first retirement projects was
to create a series of such free handouts. Based on his
books, lectures, and films, the tri-fold double-sided brochures
are aimed at parents, teachers, librarians—even future
teachers and parents.
Written
in an uncomplicated, to-the-point style, along with some
of the charts and statistics Jim has used in his books
and lectures, the brochures are free for downloading and
may be easily duplicated by nonprofit institutions dealing
with parents and community members.
The subject matter includes:
Why reading is the most important
subject in school;
How a child becomes
competent in reading;
The importance
of a child reading outside school;
Why it's essential
for parents to read aloud to children;
Listening levels
versus reading levels;
How the mere presence
of print in the home influences a child's reading skills;
The negative impact
of over-viewing of TV and video games;
How TV's "closed-captioning"
can help a child's reading;
The positive effects
of recorded books.
The things to be sure
to do when reading to children and the things to avoid;
Why is it that some
people read a lot and some (even very educated people)
read very little?
How effective is summer
reading? Don't kids need a break from school and reading?
The more you read, the
longer you live. The proof is in the formula that
shows reading to be the most powerful social
force in
America.
How do we obtain the brochures?
First, email Jim Trelease (Jim Trelease)
and seek permission to print the brochures, including in
your correspondence the name and address of the requesting
organization, its nonprofit status, and how it will be
used. Jim's email response to you (usually within 48 hours)
will allay any fears your printer may have about reprinting
a copyrighted item. Then control/option-click on
the name of the brochure below and
the brochure's PDF file will be downloaded to your computer.
Each is a megabyte in size and may take a minute
to download. Burn it to a disc (or email it) for your printing
facility. The item should be printed to both sides of a
single sheet. It's easier than pie, if you've ever tried
to bake a pie—a
lot easier!
Anyone trying to raise readers
will benefit. Furthermore,
"Why
Some Read A Lot and Some Read Very Little" deals
with both adults and children. Teachers often tell me their
spouses never read for pleasure and some even whisper that
they themselves seldom read for pleasure. There's an explanation
for this and exploring it can make for a lively
and enlightening faculty discussion. The brochure explains
Wilbur Schramm's
"Fraction of Selection," a little known but fascinating
formula that explains why, what, and how much (or little)
we read. Just as you can't catch a cold from someone who
doesn't have one, it's near to impossible to catch the
love of reading from someone who doesn't have it themselves.
Similarly, the brochure Why
Read aloud to Children? may convince
some faculty to read to students who already
know how to read. And many will find some cogent
arguments to defend the use of books over computers in Who
Needs Books When We Have Computers?
Can we read a brochure's contents before
downloading it?
Simply click on the name of the brochure (above)
and
it will open the PDF file for viewing on your browser or
in Adobe
Acrobat Reader. (By not holding down the option or
control keys while clicking, you avoid the download
until you're ready. Below are sample excerpts from the
brochure materials.
7.
THE top rodeo riders or winter Olympians
come from states where they have more horses and
cattle or more snow and ice. And reading research
shows that children who come from homes with the
most print—books,
magazines, and newspapers—have the highest
reading scores. They also use the library more than
those with lower
scores. Libraries have the most and best books in
the world—all for free. Remember:
a used-book for 50 cents—the ones in garage
sales or thrift shops—has the same words in
it as a brand new copy for $12.95. Reading families
use the 3 B’s (to help the 3
R’s): Books,
Bathroom, and Bed Lamp. Make sure there’s
a box for books and magazines in the bathroom for
idle or captive moments, and add one near the kitchen
table. Install a reading lamp near the child’s
bedside and allow the privilege of staying up 15
minutes later to read (or look at pictures) in bed.
It just might be the best night-school he’ll
ever attend.
26.
Add a third dimension to the book whenever
possible. For example, have a bowl of blueberries
ready to be eaten during or after the reading of
Robert McCloskey’s
Blueberries for Sal.
3.
Don’t feel,
as a teacher, that you must tie every book to class
work. Don’t confine the broad spectrum of
literature to the narrow limits of the curriculum.
Would you want every-thing you did all day tied
to a sermon? The object is to create a life-time
reader, not a school-time reader. That goal will
never be reached if a student thinks reading is
always associated with work or sweat.
A
PERFECT example
of how the number of distractions impedes the amount
of reading can be found in The
Read-Aloud Handbook where
I describe the decline in reading among citizens
in the country that has long led the world in per-capita
readership of books, magazines, and newspapers—Japan.
Because it is a commuting nation in which citizens
spend hours each day on mass transit, they had
large amounts of time in which to read. But after
four decades of increase, suddenly readership dropped.
Why? The arrival of technological distractions:
video games, cell phones, laptops, Blackberries,
etc. As distractions rose, readership dropped—in
spite of high literacy rates.
That should be a red flag for affluent families
bent on saddling an easily-distracted child with every new tech-gadget.
NO ONE would deny the importance
of conversation in a child’s life.
But when it comes to building rich vocabulary, nothing
does it like words that
come from “print.” When
researchers counted the words we use most often, the
total came to 10,000 different words (the most common
word is “the”). Beyond the 10,000 mark,
you meet what are called the “rare” words.
Though we use these words less frequently in conversation,
they make up more and more of what you must know in
order to understand complicated ideas and feelings
in print, be it The New York
Times, textbook, or novel.
Thus the more rare (book) words a child knows, the
more easily he or she will be able to read complex
ideas.
WHETHER you’re
a high- or low-end user of TV, one thing should be
done to make the most of it whenever it’s in
use: turn on closed-captioning. Finland’s
children don’t start formal schooling until age-seven,
yet achieve the highest reading scores in the world.
Finnish families also are among the highest users of
closed-captioning because more than half of everything
shown on Finnish TV is captioned (most of the shows’ dialogs
are in languages other than Finnish). To understand
such shows, a child must be able to read Finnish— and
read it fast!
THERE
is an axiom in education that says “you get dumber
in the summer.” A two-year study of 3,000 students
in Atlanta, Georgia, attempted to see if that was
true and found that everyone—top student and bottom
student—learns more slowly in the summer but some do worse than slow down; they actually go into reverse,
as you can see in the chart above.
WHILE
EDUCATORS and
critics decry the state of student writing, many
schools are busy adopting a computer program almost
designed to hide writing deficits: PowerPoint, a
favorite for corporate business presentations. These
presentations contain slides with built-in charts,
animated graphics, and sound effects—just like video
games. Needless to say, classmates and parents are
impressed. In suburbia, PowerPoint is fast replacing
traditional book reports.
The downside
is that content often takes a backseat to bells and
whistles. As one principal described it to The Wall
St. Journal, “You can make a pretty crappy presentation
look good.” Writing becomes sentence fragments with
bullets and sound effects, without depth.
Another
observer got to the heart of the matter: “When I
was working in a school technology department, I
watched eighth-grade students present PowerPoint
projects to an obviously proud superintendent. Curious,
I counted the number of words that each student had
actually written. On average, each eighth-grade student
had spent two weeks writing 77 words.”
ONE
CAN EVEN ARGUE:
reading is the single most powerful social factor
in American life today. Here’s a formula to support
that. It sounds simplistic, but all its parts can
be documented, and while not universal, it holds
true far more often than not—nothing affects our
society like reading (or not-reading).
The more you know, the
smarter you grow.2
The smarter you are,
the longer you stay in school.3
The longer you stay in
school, the more diplomas you earn and the longer
you are employed—thus the more money you earn
in a lifetime. (see chart below)4
The more diplomas you
earn, the higher your own children’s grades
eventually will be in school.5
And the more diplomas
you earn, the longer you live.6
school’s
objective should be to create lifetime readers—graduates who continue
to read and educate themselves throughout their adult lives.
But the reality is we create schooltime readers—graduates
who know how to read well enough to graduate. And at that
point the majority take a silent vow: If I never read another
book, it’ll
be too soon.
The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying adult reading habits for almost 25 years and their most recent report coincided perfectly with the NAEP assessment of pleasure reading among 13- and 17-year-olds. Adult reading of literature (fiction books, short stories, or poetry) was down 22 percent from its 1982 survey, and the decline was evidenced in every age, gender, ethnic, or educational category. By 2002, only 46.7 percent of 17,000 adults surveyed had read any fiction in the last year.1 When that was expanded in a different survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only 50 percent of adults.2 In short, half of America is alliterate.
In comparing 2004 NAEP scores with those of 1971, there is no change for 17-year-olds and an insignificant change for the 13-year-olds.3 That's 30 years, with half of it devoted to national and state curriculum reform and higher standards, yet no improvement. Actually there was a change among the high school seniors in the last 20 years and it mirrored the change in adult reading habits. As I noted, the adult recreational reading dropped 22 percent in the last 20 years. Among 17-year-olds (where all the elementary instruction is supposed to take root and finally blossom), the percent who never read anything for fun increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. When you add on those who read only once a month or a few times a year, the figure expands to 48 percent, pretty close to what you find among adults.
This trend was first noticed as far back as 1983 and a national committee was created to explore the causes and solutions. It was called the Commission on Reading, organized by the National Academy of Education and the National Institute of Education and funded under the U.S. Department of Education. It consisted of nationally recognized experts in how children develop, how they learn language, and how they learn to read. Since nearly everything in the curriculum of school rested upon reading, the consensus was that reading was at the heart of either the problem or the solution. This commission was markedly different from the one created in 2000, the National Reading Panel, the one that created the reading curriculum under the No Child Left Behind Act (Reading First). More on that later.
The 1983 commission took two years to pour through more than 10,000 research projects done in the last quarter century to determine what works, what might work, and what doesn’t work.
In 1985, the commission issued its report, Becoming
a Nation of Readers. Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud and clear:
“The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for
eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”4
The commission found conclusive evidence to support reading aloud not
only in the home but also in the classroom: “It is a practice that should continue
throughout the grades.”5
In its wording—“the single most important activity”—the experts were saying reading aloud was more important than worksheets, homework, assessments, book reports, and flashcards. One of the cheapest, simplest, and oldest tools of teaching was being promoted as a better teaching tool than anything else in the home or classroom. What exactly is so powerful about something so simple you don’t even need a high school diploma in order to do it and how exactly does a person get better at reading? It boils down to a simple, two-part formula:
The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it,
the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.
The more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter
you grow.6
How can something so simple as reading aloud to a
child be so effective?
We start with the brain. As lumber is the primary support for building a house, words are the primary structure for learning. And there are really only two efficient ways to get words into a person's brain: either through the eye or through the ear. Since it'll be years before the eye is used for reading, the best source for ideas and brain building in a young child becomes the ear. What we send into that ear becomes the "sound" foundation for the rest of the child's "brain house." Those meaningful sounds in the ear now will help the child make sense of the words coming in through the eye later when learning to read.
We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with children: to reassure, to entertain, to bond; to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire. But in reading aloud, we also:
Condition the child’s brain to associate reading with pleasure
Create background knowledge
Build vocabulary
Provide a reading role model
One factor hidden in the decline of students' recreational reading is that it coincides with a decline in the amount of time adults read to them. By middle school, almost no one is reading aloud to students. If each read-aloud is a commercial for the pleasures of reading, then a decline in advertising would naturally be reflected in a decline in students recreational reading.
There are two basic "reading facts of life” that are ignored in most education circles, yet without these two principles working in tandem, little else will work.
Reading Fact No. 1: Human
beings are pleasure-centered.
Reading Fact No. 2: Reading
is an accrued skill.
Let’s examine Fact No. 1: Human beings are pleasure-centered. Human beings will voluntarily do over and over that which brings them pleasure. That is, we go to the restaurants we like, order the foods we like, listen to the radio stations that play the music we like, and visit the in-laws we like. Conversely, we avoid the foods, music, and in-laws we dislike. Far from being a theory, this is a physiological fact. We approach what causes pleasure, and we withdraw from what causes unpleasure or pain.7
This fact applies to nearly everything we do willingly. Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a “pleasure” message to the child’s brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure. There are, however, “unpleasures” associated with reading and school. The learning experience can be tedious or boring, threatening, and without meaning—endless hours of worksheets, hours of intensive phonics instruction, and hours of unconnected-test questions. If a child seldom experiences the “pleasures” of reading and but increasingly meets its “unpleasures,” then the natural reaction will be withdrawal.
And that brings us to Reading Fact No. 2: Reading is
an accrued skill. This means reading is like riding a bicycle, driving a car, or sewing: in order to get better at it you must do it. And the more you read, the better you get at it.
The last 30 years of reading research8 confirms
this simple formula—regardless of sex, race, nationality, or socioeconomic
background. Students who read the most, read the best, achieve the most, and
stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who don’t read much, cannot get
better at it. (The NEA report of 2007 confirmed this right into adulthood;
see “Study Links Drop in Test Scores
to a Decline in Time Spent Reading.”)
Why don’t students read more? Because of Reading Fact No. 1: the large number of “unpleasure” messages they received throughout their school years, coupled with the lack of “pleasure” messages in the home, nullify any attraction from the book. They avoid books and print the same way a cat avoids a hot stove burner. There is ample proof for all these hypotheses in my answer to the next question.
Do you have any
free handouts on reading we can give
to parents?
So many schools and libraries asked
Jim Trelease that question after he retired from public speaking,
he made such a series of free brochures one of his first projects.
Based on his books, films, and lectures, these double-sided, single-page
brochures are available for free downloads here at FREE
BROCHURES.
To
search this site, use the Google search
engine to the left. You can also consult the Site
Contents page. Occasionally Google reports
older, out-of-date pages ("404
Error") which can usually be found using
the Internet
Archives (pasting the missing URL
into
the "WayBackMachine" space).
COPYRIGHT NOTICE Trelease on Reading is copyright 2006,
2007, 2008 by Jim Trelease and Reading Tree
Productions.
All rights reserved. Any problems
or queries about this site should be directed
to:
Reading Tree Webmaster
lower
scores. Libraries have the most and best books in
the world—all for free. Remember:
a used-book for 50 cents—the ones in garage
sales or thrift shops—has the same words in
it as a brand new copy for $12.95. Reading families
use the 3 B’s (to help the 3
R’s): Books,
Bathroom, and Bed Lamp. Make sure there’s
a box for books and magazines in the bathroom for
idle or captive moments, and add one near the kitchen
table. Install a reading lamp near the child’s
bedside and allow the privilege of staying up 15
minutes later to read (or look at pictures) in bed.
It just might be the best night-school he’ll
ever attend.
26.
Add a third dimension to the book whenever
possible. For example, have a bowl of blueberries
ready to be eaten during or after the reading of
Robert McCloskey’s
Blueberries for Sal.
A
PERFECT example
of how the number of distractions impedes the amount
of reading can be found in The
Read-Aloud Handbook where
I describe the decline in reading among citizens
in the country that has long led the world in per-capita
readership of books, magazines, and newspapers—Japan.
Because it is a commuting nation in which citizens
spend hours each day on mass transit, they had
large amounts of time in which to read. But after
four decades of increase, suddenly readership dropped.
Why? The arrival of technological distractions:
video games, cell phones, laptops, Blackberries,
etc. As distractions rose, readership dropped—in
spite of high literacy rates.
at
come from “print.” When
researchers counted the words we use most often, the
total came to 10,000 different words (the most common
word is “the”). Beyond the 10,000 mark,
you meet what are called the “rare” words.
Though we use these words less frequently in conversation,
they make up more and more of what you must know in
order to understand complicated ideas and feelings
in print, be it The New York
Times, textbook, or novel.
Thus the more rare (book) words a child knows, the
more easily he or she will be able to read complex
ideas.
WHETHER you’re
a high- or low-end user of TV, one thing should be
done to make the most of it whenever it’s in
use: turn on closed-captioning. Finland’s
children don’t start formal schooling until age-seven,
yet achieve the highest reading scores in the world.
Finnish families also are among the highest users of
closed-captioning because more than half of everything
shown on Finnish TV is captioned (most of the shows’ dialogs
are in languages other than Finnish). To understand
such shows, a child must be able to read Finnish— and
read it fast! 
WHILE
EDUCATORS and
critics decry the state of student writing, many
schools are busy adopting a computer program almost
designed to hide writing deficits: PowerPoint, a
favorite for corporate business presentations. These
presentations contain slides with built-in charts,
animated graphics, and sound effects—just like video
games. Needless to say, classmates and parents are
impressed. In suburbia, PowerPoint is fast replacing
traditional book reports. 
school’s
objective should be to create lifetime readers—graduates who continue
to read and educate themselves throughout their adult lives.
But the reality is we create schooltime readers—graduates
who know how to read well enough to graduate. And at that
point the majority take a silent vow: If I never read another
book, it’ll
be too soon. 
