Read Aloud Handbook Quotes

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.

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

Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

The closest thing we have to a "crap detector" is a qualified librarian.

Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to.

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head—by reading.

Children’s books, even good picture books, are much richer than ordinary home or classroom conversation,

So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?" Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child.

Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don’t meet your high standards.

What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.

More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.

The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the ten thousand common words but by how many rare words we understand.

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, while some learn better than others. There is a difference. For the parent who thinks that sooner is better, who has an eighteen-month-old child barking at flash cards, 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.

When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.

The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they’re reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!

the great ones—you can still taste them years later, even remember the exact spot where you met them. You can’t always put your finger on why they linger with you, but they do.

In a similar experiment involving reading to fetuses during the two and a half months before birth, DeCasper found the child’s heartbeat increased with a new story and decreased with a familiar one.

So how do we educate the heart? There are really only two ways: life experience and stories about life experience, which is called literature. Great preachers and teachers—Aesop, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, and Jesus—have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart.

Visual receptors in the brain outnumber auditory receptors 30:1.32 In other words, the chances of a word (or sentence) being retained in our memory bank are thirty times greater if we see it instead of just hear it.

When someone becomes a teacher, she’s like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. All year long she’s trying to entice students to go out on dates with authors—that is, to pick up this book or that book and spend twenty minutes with the author, someone they’ve never met. The better she knows her students and authors or books, the more successful will be the “matchmaking.” But the teacher (or librarian) who doesn’t read much will fail for sure.

There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That’s developmentally the natural time.

Sector 7 by David Wiesner (Clarion, 1997)

What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

You need the combination of know-how and motivation.

If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.

Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: “Don’t Forget Your Flood Book.” Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, “flood” books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from these books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor’s office.

Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers—900 and 7,800—will appear over and over in this book.

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families fail to do the right things for literacy (to scare). And finally, we’d have to shame some families into doing the right thing,

ashtray.” Gradually, public opinion swayed public practice and public policy, forcing legislation and litigation that would affect most homes and every public space in America. After fifty years, fewer than 23 percent of Americans smoke, and hundreds of millions of lives and dollars have been affected or saved. Following that model, we could change parental practices in this country—not in one year or one presidential administration, but over several decades. It would work, however, only if we followed that three-pronged attack, because different people are motivated to change for

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instead, they put her on a dose of fourteen read-aloud books a day. By age five, Cushla was found by psychologists to be well above average in intelligence and a socially well-adjusted child.

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From 2,272 text messages a month in 2008, American teenagers (ages 13–17) ballooned to 3,339 messages a month in 2010, an average of six per waking hour. Simply put, 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.

The brainstorm became known as eCAP (El Crystal Audiobook Project) and added up to sixty iPod kits (from grant money), along with six hundred audiobooks. When a teacher identifies a non-proficient reader, she sits down with the student and they construct a fifteen-book playlist from the school’s master list and load it into an iPod. The kit that accompanies it includes the book’s text, a charger, headphones, and any necessary instructions. Best of all, it stays with the student—in school and out—for the entire school year, with more books loaded as needed. The student listens to the book on the iPod while following along in the text with his eyes.

Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for eighth when fourteen-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature.

Leveraging

American history has so much been

which is called literature. Great preachers and teachers—Aesop, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, and Jesus—have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart. But when school scores either dropped

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enormously successful Emotional Intelligence34 is perhaps the most eloquent argument in support of that. Consider the following headlines, all

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families

The ancient contemplative practice of Lectio Divina—the belief that God speaks to us as we pray and ruminate on the ancient text—also inspires the way I read Scripture. Lectio is not study and analysis. It is more “hearty” than “heady,” as one expert put it.15 It is a different way of encountering God through prayerful meditation of the Scripture, listening to what the words say to your heart in this moment. Read the text three times aloud or listen as someone else does so. Note words or feelings that stand out to you, that speak to your soul in the moment. Rather than being merely a source of information about how to live, Scripture becomes, quite literally, a meeting place for a personal encounter with the Living God. Years of doing Lectio Divina inspired me to meditate on these biblical stories as I struggle to understand these times we are in. This reflection is what I will share with you in these pages.

statements like “Kissing a

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Research cited in The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease states that the more printed materials in a child’s home, the higher that child’s skills in reading, writing, and even math.

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since the first edition of this book, much has changed in the world and in American education. And so, too, this book

of those differences, there are some things that remain the same. In 1982, the U.S. economy was in its worst recession since the Great Depression, and the nation’s business leaders were looking for someone or something to blame. Sound familiar? Since SAT scores had been in a twenty-year decline (because lots of average and below-average students, and not just the rich kids, were taking the

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared

Over thirty years of reading research24 confirms this simple formula regardless of gender, race, nationality, or socioeconomic background. Students who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest.

In 2002, only 46.7 percent of adults had read any fiction in the previous year with the rate dropping to 43.1 percent in 2015.19 Parents’ reading attitudes and behaviors appear to be shared by their children.20 When parents read for pleasure, it impacts their child’s desire to do the same.

to be ordered, riding coaches creden-tialed, and mandatory riding and roping instruction begun in rodeo lab classes. All of this would culminate in mandatory grade-level rodeos (including “exit rodeos” for the high school seniors) to ensure that “no rider was left behind,” and everyone would be “racing to the top corral.” And sure as the sun sinks in the West, in this scenario there would be states that excelled and those that failed. In fact, to show this idea isn’t all that wacky, set your browser for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and look at any of their standings. You’ll find the high scorers all come from states like Utah, Texas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Colorado, rich with ranches,