The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.
Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego.
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.
The closest thing we have to a “crap detector” is a qualified librarian.
Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.
Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head – by reading.
More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.
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.
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 eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the ten thousand common words but by how many rare words we understand.
What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.
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.
Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don’t meet your high standards.
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.
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!
If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.
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.
What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That’s developmentally the natural time.
You need the combination of know-how and motivation.