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Bear on Stack of Books Why Is Reading With Your Child Important?

Reading aloud...

stimulates your child's imagination
develops your child's interest in reading and in books
improves your child's listening skills
builds vocabulary
helps your child to understand stories and 'book language'
creates a bond between you and your child
provides your child with a positive role model

Set aside a time to read aloud to your child each evening!

Reading First News

The classrooms are abuzz with activity as the Reading First program begins its “Year 3”. This is the final year of the 3-year grant and everyone – teachers and students - is working very hard to understand the techniques and requirements of the program.

Our major obstacle this year has been the extreme turnover of staff. Reading First is a very time-consuming program with extensive professional development for the teaching staff. Our new staff members are to be complimented for how quickly they have adjusted to the demands of this program. They devoted time this summer to attend different trainings – and they have been attending weekly trainings in Dixon and monthly Co-Op meetings.

DIBELS testing was administered in September. These tests help us to identify a students’ reading ability.

Intervention groups have been in progress since mid-September. These groups meet for the last period of every day. Students are given additional help in problem reading areas during this time – or they are allowed to accelerate their reading skills if they have their grade-level skills mastered

Helpful Hints

Read a favorite story more than once.
If your child asks for a story to be read again--Read it again! The repetition assists your child in gaining word recognition, story sequence, vocabulary, storybook language, etc. Most importantly, your child is enjoying the story!
Focus on enjoyment.
Choose stories that both of you will enjoy. Think about what your child's favorite things are or what they like to do.
Read from a variety of genres.
Read traditional tales and rhymes such as The Little Red Hen and 'Old Mother Hubbard' as well as stories that play with language such as Dr. Seuss' ABC's. Also, don't forget about stories that you can sing such as The Five Little Ducks by Raffi. Books with lots of repetition, predictability, and rhyme are perfect for young readers!

We read to children for all the same reasons you talk with children: to reassure, to entertain, to bond; to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire. But in reading aloud, you also:

Let's look at how we create lifetime readers. There are two basic reading "facts of life" that are ignored in many education circles, yet without these two principles working in tandem, little else will work in education reform:

Reading Fact No. 1: Human beings are pleasure-centered;

Reading Fact No. 2: Reading is an accrued skill.

Let's examine Reading Fact No. 1: Human beings are pleasure-centered. Human beings only 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, and music, and in-laws we dislike.

Far from being a theory, this is a physiological fact. When our senses send electrical messages to the "pleasure" or "unpleasure centers" of the brain, we respond positively or negatively.
Pleasure could be called the glue that holds our attention—but it only holds us to what we like. As long as we're enjoying a movie, we're connected. When we cease to enjoy it, we disconnect. It applies to nearly everything we do willingly. Every time we read to a child, we're sending a "pleasure" message (glue) 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 meets only the "unpleasures," then the natural reaction will be withdrawal.
   And that brings us to Reading Fact No. 2: Reading is an accrued skill. That 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 twenty-five years of reading research⁶ 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. And most Americans (children and adults) don't read much, and therefore aren't very good at it.⁷
   Why don't they read much? Because of Reading Fact No. 1 (human beings are pleasure-centered): 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.