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.

— from Ten Facts Parents Should Know about Reading
also available: Spanish edition

AS much as anything else, children are little sponges, soaking up the behavior and values of the dominant people around them.

A Pennsylvania social worker once told me about a family she was working with. The mother asked if it was natural for her son to pretend to be reading to his toy trucks and cars (he was too young to actually be reading). The worker had seen children read to their dolls and siblings, but to toy cars?

She told the mother this was a new slant on reading but not to worry about it. The important thing was the boy was imitating the act of reading, a very positive behavior.
Later, as she was leaving, she observed the child’s father bent over the engine of his pickup truck, a repair manual balanced on the radiator, reading aloud the instructions to himself. CLICK! It was entirely natural for the little boy to think his father was reading aloud to his truck. Monkey see, monkey do.

— from Fathers, Sons & Reading

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.

— from Thirty DO's to Remember When Reading Aloud

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.

— from A Dozen DON'Ts to Remember When Reading Aloud

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.

— from Why Some Read a Lot and Some Read Very Little

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.

— from Why Read Aloud to Children?

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!

— from The Connection Between TV & School Grades

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.

— from Summer Reading

Reading from a book or from a screen: Any difference?

TODAY'S teenager is regularly juggling e-tablets, iPods, smartphones, and laptops, along with a cable-TV in the bedroom. The 2,272 text messages a month in 2008 (for ages 13-17) ballooned to 3,339 by 2010, an average of six per waking hour. Students in one of the most formative periods of their intellectual and emotional lives are interrupted 118 times a day for messages, totaling 90 minutes. Some experts predict the plasticity of the human brain will allow it to eventually adapt to these multitasking challenges. But neuroscientists find little to be hopeful about in their studies.

— from E-books and E-learning: Not so fast!

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).

1. The more you know, the smarter you grow.²
2. The smarter you are, the longer you stay in school.³
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
4. The more diplomas you earn, the higher your own children’s grades eventually will be in school.⁵
5. And the more diplomas you earn, the longer you live.⁶

Annual Income by Education Level

— from READING: The Most Powerful
Social Force in America

[Reading aloud to the child] makes a pleasure connection between child and print. No one is born wanting to either play basketball or to read. That desire must be planted by someone outside the child. The parent (or teacher or grandparent) who reads to a child is planting seeds, making a connection to print that doesn’t hurt, that entices and gratifies instead. Homework, workbooks, and tests seldom accomplish that. Simply put, reading to the child amounts to a commercial for reading.

— from Questions Parents Always Ask About Reading Aloud