Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 8: Lessons from Oprah, Harry, and the Internet | Chapter 9: TV, Audio, and Technology: Hurting or Helping Literacy?

CHAPTER 8: Lessons from Oprah, Harry, and the Internet

Chapter eight isn't my favorite Read-Aloud Handbook chapter (because it's not really about books, per se) but Trelease does make some compelling statements about how, for a variety of reasons, schools often do a miserable job of "marketing" reading to children.

The love of reading is more caught than taught and best caught in groups.

Sigh. Another vote against institutional school. Truly, did you ever do a literature study in school that didn't make you want to die? I have two memories from high school where English was thrilling for me, both were with the same wonderful crazy-overeducated teacher. I also have a memory of reading the "Followup Questions" for the story "The Monkey's Paw" in a literature textbook, and just thinking, this is the most insulting thing that's ever happened in a year of wasted time.

Series books are avidly read by the best readers, without impeding their skills.

This sounds true, but wait, what about the weaker readers? I don't even know what series books kids crack out on these days (in my day we ladies enjoyed the Sweet Valley High), but do those series have a positive or negative impact on the skills and comprehension of weaker readers? I'm all for lots of reading of whatever flavor, but I'd be curious to know what the science says about the impact of series titles on less fluent readers.

For what it's worth, I remember being distressed in the extreme when I ran out of Nancy Drew titles to borrow from the school library in 2nd or 3rd grade. I had a ravenous hunger for books, and Nancy Drew was one of the things that kept me from feeling starved, and for that I shall always appreciate her. (Plus I learned a fact or two from her, I remember something about gypsum solving one mystery and another book was full of intriguing information about Kachina dolls and Hopi Indian culture.)



CHAPTER 9: TV, Audio and Technology: Hurting or Helping Literacy?

The Trouble With TV: For some of the benefits of TV for promoting early reading, visit the wonderful Teaching My Baby to Read blog for her list of valuable DVDs!

As for the risks, here are some eye-opening stats from Trelease:

• "The doctors concluded that for each hour of daily TV viewed by the child before age three, the risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by age seven increased 10 percent."
• "The presence of a television set in the child's bedroom was significantly associated with lower math, reading and language arts scores."

CC Serves a Purpose: Aha! On page 169, we arrive at one of my very favorite pieces of advice from this entire book: Turn on the closed captioning on your television set! Reading benefits to be enumerated below, but just as a grownup adult person, you will find yourself understanding so much more of every episode of TV that you watch. Plot-essential background noises is described, garbled jokes become comprehensible, and you will generally discover things about your programming that you never knew before!

Anyway, as for the kiddos: "The number of words flowing across the screen [via closed-captioning] in the course of three hours is more than the average adult would read in a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine. Enabling the TV's closed-captioning is the equivalent of newspaper subscription, but, unlike the subscription, it costs nothing." Trelease also discusses evidence from Finland and the deaf community that supports the use of CC, and he references some science involving visual versus auditory receptors. Check out pp 169-171 for more.

Audio Books Are Awesome: Trelease gives audiobooks a big thumbs-up. He says that the average American commute (round-trip) is 50 minutes. I've also just read that the average American is in his or her car 15 hours a week. Over the course of a year or years, if those hours are given over to educational audio, driving delivers a large quantity of newfound "time on-task" that would otherwise be lost to Carly Rae Jepsen, et al.

According to Trelease, "the heaviest users [of audiobooks] are among the most literate people in America [and] 75 percent were college graduates and 41 percent had advanced degrees."

In addition to traditional audiobooks, Trelease gives a shoutout to NPR and the BBC. I've been meaning to do more "carschooling" and in researching have found recommendations for Librivox (free recordings of public domain stuff) and this very charming archive of children's records from the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention usual suspects Audible.com and the library.

And that's all folks! The rest of the Treasury is Trelease's very valuable compilation of read-alouds by age, interest and reading level, so this concludes our read-along of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Enjoy exploring his many wonderful recommendations, and good luck!

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 7: The Print Climate in the Home, School and Library

Chapter 7 of The Read-Aloud Handbook is about "the print climate" at home, and at the end of the day, it's the reason I collect children's books so passionately. It's also the reason I love Jen's latest post about setting up a reading nook for your kids! And why I'm always drawn back to Read-Aloud Dad's post about the "benefits" of boredom.

This chapter convinced me that one of the greatest gifts I can give my kid is "books on hand." For all those hours of the day when nothing is scheduled, let the default entertainment be a book. (There are disadvantages to this plan, however: A major source of disarray in this house is books scattered everywhere all the time. Oh well.)

Anyway, in this chapter, Trelease outlines the ways that living in a book oasis or a book desert effects the intellectual nourishment or starvation of entire populations and certainly specific children. He writes, "The last two decades of research...unmistakably connect access to print with high reading scores and, conversely, lack of access with lower scores."

And here's a quote from literacy activist David Mazor that hits home with me every time: "I live in this community [Amherst, Mass.] where we have all these books that no one's read since junior was in fourth grade. So out they go to the yard sale go the books on a weekend. If nobody buys them, they get thrown out. It's like having all these oil wells in your backyard. 'What a nuisance! How are we going to get rid of all this excess oil?' Books in affluent homes don't get reread or worn out." I find this to be so very true. I come across the most amazing books in the most amazing condition, and they are invariably inscribed with gift dedications to little children from doting aunties or grandmas. The book lay fallow and unread for five or so years, and then was quietly sent to Goodwill. These books are in virtually new condition and at $1 each, I wouldn't dream of passing them up. Trash to treasure and all that.

The most important section of this chapter, however, is the rain-gutter bookshelves suggestion. Basically: Display books with the covers out, which appeals to kids much more strongly than barely readable spines. Pinterest exists to show you a million fantastic examples of rain-gutter bookshelves or the trendy new Ikea-spice-rack bookshelves alternative. The spice-rack thing is totally on my list for next time I hit the labrynthine nightmare that is Ikea, but I'm not braving that store just for spice racks!

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 6: In Their Own Words

The "In Their Own Words" chapter is one of my favorite chapters of The Read-Aloud Handbook. It's full of touching testimonial letters from Read-Aloud fans, testifying about how the book changed their lives. My favorite letter is from a rich guy in Minnesota who wanted to do something for the schools. The guy created NERF (Nisswa Enhanced Reading Foundation) and he raises money as well donating out of his pocket to do the following for his local schools:

* Beautiful Books: Fancy, expensive books are sent home for reading aloud by families
* Classroom Libraries: Every teacher gets $250-$300 a year to build their class book collections. New teachers get even bigger grants because they're starting from zero.
* Incentive Reading Room: A room of paperback books where kids can go "shopping" for reward books.
* March Madness: A contest for "most out-of-school reading minutes" that results in more book prizes for the winners.
* Rainy Day Bookstore: NERF has an account at the local bookstore and if one of the teachers needs a certain book on short notice, they can just go get it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if every school in the country had these kind of literacy programs in place? There was recently a tragic situation at a local public school. It's been discussed in detail on a mom list I subscribe to and a  public teacher piped in to explain that in that area of the district, things are in such chaos so much of the time that it would be easy for kids to fall through the cracks. Her email made me so sad. No matter how much teachers and parents work to improve schools, isn't there just a massive budget crunch that's holding our schools back? I don't have the solution, but I hope that collective action of some kind--if not higher property taxes, perhaps just more of the initiatives described above?--can make a difference for all our kids!

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 4: The Dos and Don'ts of Read-Aloud, Part 2

More selected dos from chapter 4, with commentary. Just FYI, I picked out ones that are relevant to reading to littles. If you're reading to older kids, get yourself a copy of The Read-Aloud Handbook for many more great tips.

Before you begin to read, always say the name of the book, the author, and the illustrator--no matter how many times you have read the book.


I did this obediently, if skeptically, and it has paid off in spades, to my great surprise. At 19 months, Jackson recognizes the names of quite a few children's book authors: Eric Carle, Donald Crews, Richard Scarry and more. For example, now when we read Freight Train by Donald Crews, he asks for "Buh...Donna...buh...Donna," which is baby for "School Bus by Donald Crews. Yes, please read me School Bus by Donald Crews as well, thank you kindly." He saw a picture of Eric Carle on the back of The Grouchy Ladybug and thought he looked like a "Poppa" (grandpa) and now he shouts "Cara, Cara" every time we read a Carle book. On behalf of the writers of the world, it's a pleasure to see the kiddo quasi-comprehend authorship, even at this early age!

If you are reading a picture book, make sure the children can see the pictures easily.


The book stand I got at Office Depot has worked out amazingly well. We do a lot of reading aloud at mealtimes, and the bookstand allows me to keep the book front and center for the kid. My hands are mostly free, and the book remains stationary so that the kiddo can really get a good look at the detail of the illustrations. Spending money on anything new is a risk, but the book stand was a good investment.

Fathers should make an extra effort to read to their children. Because the vast majority of primary-school teachers are women, young boys often associated reading with women and schoolwork.


Not sure whether this will be a problem we need to remediate, but I am incredibly grateful to have a husband who is an avid reader-aloud. He actually came to L.A. years ago with dreams of being a voice-over performer so he's quite adept at reading something with dramatic flair that he's never seen before. He's always willing to "Ree ree ree" (read read read) when the kiddo demands it, even if the kiddo only pays attention for two pages. I actually have no valuable commentary on this one, I just wanted to be publicly thankful my husband is so great about this!

When children are watching television, closed-captioning should be activated along with sound. 


I love this advice because it's so unusual. It's not germane to the kid at this point, but I started doing this on Trelease's advice and I love it. Most shows make a great deal more sense if you can read the jokes, background noises and the dialects as they appear on the page rather than strictly in the picture, plus they often include descriptive parentheticals that provide details you wouldn't be able to pick out from just watching. The only downside is that the captions usually give away the punchline of jokes before the actor reads the line!

Add a third dimension to the book whenever possible. For example, have a bowl of blueberries ready to be eaten during or after a reading of Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal.


You could also provide a bear ready to be eaten during or after a reading of Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal, but that might be a bit over the top. (Seriously though, I love this advice and it's the basis of more than one popular homeschool approach, most notably the Five in a Row curriculum that first inspired my theme weeks approach.)

Don't be fooled by awards. Just because a book won an award doesn't guarantee it will make a good-read aloud.


I include this one just so I can link to this awesome list of Worst Caldecott Winners, which delights me in principle and practice. I don't know most of these books, but I will agree that Song of the Swallows is lame. Of course, we'll probably have to choke that one down eventually as part of a quasi-mandatory SoCal field trip to see the swallows return San Juan Capistrano. Hee.

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 4: The Dos and Don'ts of Read-Aloud

I do so love a good bullet-pointed list, and this chapter of Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook is bullets as far as the eye can see. Whee! Here are some of my favorite read-aloud "do" guidelines from Trelease, along with my helpful commentary.

With infants and toddlers, it is critically important to include in your readings those books that include repetitions; as they mature, add predictable and rhyming books.


My husband thinks repetitive and predictable books are dullsville, but Jackson loves them, of course. There was a period when we were plodding around a variety of literary barnyards for weeks and weeks and weeks, just because the animals said their noises on each page in a predictable and repetitious way, every single time. (The Animals of Farmer Jones and The Very Busy Spider, I'm looking at you.) I've also found that the littles like books that make their parents sing. Sometimes these books are simply illustrated versions of actual songs, like Old MacDonald Had a Farm (we enjoyed this oversize edition from Child's Play), other times they might be something like a particularly sing-songy Sandra Boynton (e.g., Snuggle Puppy), but especially since I'm not much a natural performer, "singing" books are great. P.S. A fellow mom referred me to an audiobook version of Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, read by Carl Reiner, and even though it's theoretically for much older children, I seems ideal for toddlers because of the constant mellifluous repetition. Last but not least, I love these little finger-puppet books. They make the kids spaz out, and again, they're a great crutch for moms like me who aren't natural performers.

Read as often as you and the child (or students) have time for) and Set aside at least one traditional time a day for a story.


We're good at reading all day long, but I must admit that a traditional bedtime story sometimes gets away from us because I just want to get the dang kid in bed! We read most often at mealtimes (especially lunch), second-most at potty-time, and third-most often at bedtime, thanks in part to the bookcase being right next to the dining table and the four small book baskets in Jackson's room. The book baskets generally contain favorite board books, while the bookcases have most of our larger storybooks and a funkier variety of board books. I've heard tell moms who do bathtime reading, but I've just never figured out what to read in there that would be more fun than "Splashing! Splashing!"

Encourage relatives living far away to record stories on audio cassettes that can be mailed to the child.


Awww, audio cassettes. Isn't he precious? Hee. My in-laws have a weekly Skype call with Jackson's cousin, and grandma L. almost always reads a picture book aloud to cousin K. The practice is, by all accounts, a big hit.

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, these books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from "flood" books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor's office.


You know who always had a flood book? Rory Gilmore. A quick Google reveals this YouTube compilation that explains it all perfectly. (Hermoine Granger and Lisa Simpson would also be able to demonstrate this for you if you asked.)



As for myself, I've really be meaning to put together a "car library," but I like having all the current favorites in the house! I'm thinking maybe some kind of 500-page anthology would do the trick, but we'll see.

But wait there's more! Come back soon for the rest of the interesting "dos" in this chapter, along with some notable don'ts. To be continued...


What are your favorite read-aloud tips, tricks and "rules"? 

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 3: The Stages of Read-Aloud

I am skipping most of the first section of this chapter in favor of a referral to the excellent quasi-spinoff book Baby Read-Aloud Basics, which covers the 0 to 24 months age in much more depth than Trelease is able to do here. Have I reviewed Baby Read-Aloud Basics here yet? I suppose I haven't and I should, but suffice it to say, both this book and that one explain what various ages are able to comprehend, how much wiggling to expect, and so forth.

My favorite part of the early-stages section of this chapter is a transcript of a parent reading aloud from Blueberries for Sal, with the verbatim text underlined, which allows the reader to see that active readers-aloud are in dialogue with both the text and the child, commenting on pictures, explaining difficult vocabulary and adding and subtracting language as is age-appropriate for the wee bebe.

Ooh! Ooh! So glad I'm re-reading. We're in the "labeling the environment" stage right now and for this Trelease recommends The Everything Book by Denise Fleming and My First Word Book by Jane Yorke. Oh, I must Bing those. (Just kidding!)

Trelease also asserts: "Prior to age two, repeated readings of fewer books is better than a huge collection read infrequently." (YMMV.) And, in a statement that I cling to on all the days when we do family stuff and life stuff instead of book stuff, Trelease writes, "For as long as possible, your read-aloud efforts should be balanced by the outside experiences you bring to the child...it is not enough to simply read to the child...the words in the book are just the beginning."

This is a handy tip for guesstimating reading levels: "The amount of text on a page is a good way to gauge how much the child's attention span is being stretched. When my grandson Tyler was two years old, he regularly read books with just a few sentences on a page, but by three and a half he was listening to books that had three times as much text...The transition from short to longer should be done gradually over many different books." Conversely, as a parent, you can use this tip to eyeball what the "next stage" book for your kid could/should/would be. First you're doing a four words on a page, and then 10 words per page, and then three sentences per page, and then it's 10 sentences per page, and so on. Also, don't be afraid to start chapter books as early as pre-K (or earlier if your kids are magical), and don't be in a big ol' rush to drop picture books. The chapter books extend their attention span, and the picture books keep their imagination stoked. It's a powerful combination.

If and when you buy this book, do NOT miss page 61, which is Trelease's masterpiece. OK, that may be overselling it, but he lists what books he would use if he were to start reading aloud to a primary class or child that had never been read to before. It's a textured and dense model any parent can borrow from and modify. Good, good stuff.

Last but not least, from this chapter: Read aloud to your children when they are trapped, more or less. This is mealtime with babies and toddlers, chore time with older kids, car time, bathroom time, etc. If they will sit and listen without being imprisoned, fantastic, but if they're always on the run, take your moments and be sure to read aloud to them when you've got them cornered.

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 2: When to Begin (and End) Read-Aloud

The short answers to the questions posed in the chapter title of chapter two of The Read-Aloud Handbook "When to Begin (and End) Read Aloud?" are (a) start reading aloud at birth, or maybe even as early as the third trimester of pregnancy, and (b) stop reading aloud when they graduate from high school, or maybe later. Of course, the real answers are longer than that, and the whys are important, but the gist of this chapter is that you should begin showering your child with words, rhymes, rhythms and book knowledge as early as possible and keep it up as long as possible.

Now, before I continue, I must lament that Trelease has said that the sixth edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook will be his last, because there's a recent news story that just screams to be included in this chapter: "Father and Daughter Bond by Years of Reading," New York Times, March 21, 2010, p ST2.



You can also watch the above CBS News clip about Jim and Kristen Brozina, but the gist of it is that this guy read to his younger daughter for 3,218 nights straight, until "Kristen's first day of college, and it was time. Her dorm room was so crowded with boxes, he read to her in a stairwell. The Streak ended as it began, with L. Frank Baum, the first chapter of his most famous 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.' 'It was hard,' Kristen said. 'Not only was I moving away, but we were ending this thousands-of-times tradition. There's nothing I’ve ever done with that consistency, not even brushing my teeth.' "

Sniffle. Now, OK, back to our text:

BEGINNING: Trelease points out that you start talking to your kid immediately upon their arrival in the world, exposing them to spoken English, there's no reason you can't start reading to them immediately as well, contingent upon your wakefulness in those early days and the kiddo's attention span. Yes, it's just another way to do togetherness in the early months, but practice makes perfect. Start early and it's easy to continue. He even points to researching showing that newborns appear to recognize passages read aloud by their mothers repeatedly during the third trimester of pregnancy. They will absorb patterns and sounds at this early stage, so get going on that Goodnight Moon!

LEARNING TO READ BY LISTENING: Early exposure to books can result in kids being what are called "early fluent readers." Trelease doesn't recommend any kind of seatwork or formal instruction, but rather "the way Scout learned [to read] in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird--by sitting on the lap of a parent and listening, listening as the parent's finger moves over the pages, until gradually, in the child's own good time, a connection is made between the sound of a certain word and the appearance of certain letters on a page." He notes that "listening comprehension feeds reading comprehension," stating that children can hear/listen/understand at a far far higher level than they can read, and reading aloud from a higher-level books builds their vocabularies further still. And then he makes one of my favorite points in the whole book: "If you're still reading those Dr. Seuss controlled-vocabulary books to the child [at age six]--like The Cat in the Hat or Hop on Pop--you're insulting the child's brain cells nightly...With either book, you have a volume of 225 words and a six-year-old has a 6,000-word vocabulary...At age six you're a beginning reader...but you're not a beginning listener!"

ERIN HASSETT: Trelease encourages "reading from day one" throughout this chapter, at one point telling the story of a teacher friend of his who began teaching preschoolers after having long taught junior high kids. On her first day she was surprised and disappointed when she tried to read-aloud to the kids and within two minutes half of them had drifted off to other parts of the classroom. "Ellie later learned that one of the two children who had listened through the entire story was a child who had been read to from day one." The kids who had already been read-aloud to at home knew how to listen, wanted to listen and had the ability to listen. Trelease's other anecdote in favor of reading aloud to children from infancy through toddlerhood, preschool and beyond is this great kid named Erin Hassett. Her mother was an experienced teacher when she had Erin, and she put all her teacherly mojo into her daughter as she raised her, and most importantly for this book, took notes on the process. Erin Hassett's story, as told via her mom Linda's notes, is the number one reason I started reading to Jackson as soon as I brought him home from the hospital. I constantly refine my technique to be age appropriate, but I'm adamant about making sure there is at least one book and hopefully many books in Jackson's day, every day. ANYWAY, Erin's mom did stuff far above and beyond a mortal mom's capacity. Here's what she shared about her basic read-aloud agenda for Erin:

* 0-4 months: Soft chunky books, board books, and firmer-paged, lift-the-flap books
* 4-8 months: Poems, songs and pop-up books while Erin was in her jumper, plus the sturdy books and magazines
* 10-15 months: Mom starts doing storybook readalouds to Erin in her high-chair. "A note in my journal for Feb. 4, 1990, reads: '9 books after breakfast, 10 books and 4 poems after lunch, 7 books after dinner.'" That's 26 books in just one day, and per Trelease, "This was not an unusual day's reading."

And then, writes Erin's mom: "Shortly after our move to Pennsylvania, I was reading her The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle--as I had been doing for the last six months. This time, during the reading of the second sentence ("One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and--pop!--out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar"), while I was still forming my mouth to say "pop," Erin said the word "pop!" and with perfect inflection. She was 17 months old that day and it was the start of her inserting words into familiar stories. What an addition to an already pleasant experience."

It goes on like this, and it's a fabulous narrative. (Erin's mom needs a retroactive blog!) Suffice to say, Erin taught herself to read without really telling anyone (although she did reveal herself a bit by reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar aloud to Head Start preschoolers when she was six), was a success her whole academic career and lived happily ever after. Erin's story is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book and entirely worthy of the four pages devoted to it. I'd be interested to hear other such anecdotes and/or know if there are any studies attempting to pinpoint which aspect of the "day one reading" might be most powerful. Is it just the enthusiastic parenting? How does the early exposure to books and words affect the developing brain? Or is this just a one-off coincidence? (I'm sure it's not, but I'd be interested to see these questions examined in a controlled setting.)

LEARNING TO BE A HUMAN BY LISTENING: Much of this chapter is dedicated to battling education-system apparatchiks and uptight parents worried about how "wasting time" reading aloud might have a negative effect on reading scores (which is their right, of course, but oh my god, shut up), but Trelease ends on this heroic note, defending the power of reading to make good people out of us all.

"So how do we educate the heart? There are really only two ways: life experience and stories about life experience, which is called literature." Preach, brother.

Up next: Chapter Three: The Stages of Read Aloud, wherein Trelease explores the finer points of reading aloud to children of various ages.

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook - Chapter 1: Why Read Aloud?

The first chapter of Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook argues in favor of reading aloud as a way of teaching a love of books, stories and reading, enriching vocabulary, providing background knowledge and allowing all of these benefits to accrue as early as possible.

Trelease asserts that reading success is consequent to incorporating the following formulas/policies into your life and the lives of your children: "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."

Trelease believes that reading aloud should begin right away and continue "throughout the grades" to provide the following benefits: "condition the child's brain to associate reading with pleasure, create background knowledge, build vocabulary and provide a reading role model." Trelease says that 30 years of reading research show that, if all goes according to plan (meaning no unforeseen dyslexia or other learning trauma), "Students who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest."

Take-Aways:

• "Research has show that repeated (at least three) picture book readings increases vocabulary acquisition by 15 to 40 percent, and the learning is relatively permanent." (p 9) I was just reading another book about reading (Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write--from Baby to Age 7) and while I don't entirely trust that book's emphasis on memory work, the author did make a strong case for repetition being essential for learning (a fact also emphasized by my beloved Bright from the Start), so I've been trying to read any library book that Jackson "accepts" at least five times. (Some books he won't tolerate no matter how much I try, and others he wants to read 25 times, but basically once I get a foot in the door, I try to read a picture book aloud at least five times before we return it to the library. Current hits are City Hawk: The Story of Pale Male and Bear Snores On, but on the other hand, he is absolutely refusing to participate in Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore.)
• Activate upper-middle class anxiety beacon! "Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who came in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying." OMG, my 17-month-old has never been to a historic site. #FAILURE!! I'm kidding. But um, I am now thinking I should take the kiddo down to Olvera Street to partake of the "history," the mildly racist Latino-themed tourist tschotskes and an enchilada. 
• "By age four, [children] already understand two-thirds to three-quarters of the words [they] will use in future daily life." Dang!
• I can't even deal with the implications of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, but in case you are unfamiliar with this study, here are some key points:
• Upper middle-class/professional kids are exposed to 45 million words before they start kindergarten, working class kids hear about 30 million, and welfare kids hear about 15 million. 
• By the time they were three years old, the upper-middle class kids in the study were evidencing larger daily vocabularies than the welfare-group adults.
• In addition to their sheer poverty of words, the welfare-group kids hear a demonstrably larger number of "prohibitions" and corrections, meaning they not only hear fewer words but more of those words are of the "No...don't" ilk, which all but stops their natural curiosity in its tracks.
• I thought for sure that this study was either a mistake, a scam, a political screed or just lazy science, but I read the entire book today and the Hart-Risley longitudinal study could not have been more meticulously conducted or carefully reported. The upshot appears to be that the most fortunate kids are not (necessarily) the ones with most money but the ones who have the most engaged, chatty, interactive parents during the crucial kid-learning-to-communicate phase from 12-36 months (and beyond). UPDATE: Read my full analysis of the Hart-Risley research in Feast or Famine: How Children Thrive or Starve on Diets of Good (or Bad) Words.

Chapter Highlights:

Trelease always gives good story, and for me the three most memorable anecdotes (selected from among many good candidates) from the first chapter are these:

• Reading aloud is a Communist plot! Cigar-rolling factories in Cuba and Florida in the 1920s employed a reader-aloud ("la lectura") for hours a day to distract and entertain workers with the news, novels and political tracts. Eventually a combination of cutthroat capitalism and the radio put la lectura out of business, but Bakuin and Dumas both had their day before it all came to an end.
• One irate father's letter to the editor about the foolishness of reading aloud to children (he more or less thinks reading aloud is for pantywaists) is totally worth the cost of admission.
• In the last section, which asserts that "complex thinking prevents Alzheimer's disease, and complex thinking, aka 'idea density', is a product of vocabulary and reading comprehension, which are themselves products of lots of reading aloud", the side-by-side autobiographical snippets from Sister Helen and Sister Emma make for good reading. (I have to remember to Google for the rest of Sister Emma's life story!)

Basically, chapter one asserts that reading aloud is the biggest and best shovel available for dishing large quantities of words, sounds, ideas and rhythms into the brain of your child's developing brain. I doubt anyone really disagrees with this assertion, but Trelease makes the argument entirely entertaining with his tales of orphans-made-good (Horatio Alger saves lives!) and school principals who soothe the savage beast of the inner-city teen with a few good chapter books read aloud twice a day.

Up next, in Chapter Two: When To Begin (and End) to Read Aloud, meet the amazing children of the book! They are read to, they read, they conquer the world! (Seriously though, the Erin Hassett section has had as big an influence as anything on how I'm raising Jackson. Come back soon and we'll talk about her and her awesome mom.)

Rereading and Reviewing The Read-Aloud Handbook

  The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease is my book. Everything I'm doing with my kid is because of this book. It was the first, and for a long time, the only, book I read about being an educationally involved parent.

In the introduction to the sixth (and final, sniffle) edition, Trelease states, "This is not a book about teaching a child how to read; it's about teaching a child to want to read." That's stuck with me, but as I've now read several books (and/or websites) that do address actual reading instruction, I thought I ought to go back and reread The Read-Aloud Handbook with a more critical eye.

Do his recommendations hold up? Is The Read-Aloud Handbook more than a political anti-No Child Left Behind jeremiad? Is he secretly advocating for whole language reading instruction? Or is it just delightful overblown, overpriced reading list that strings together a series of charming but pointless anecdotes? Let's read and find out:

INTRODUCTION (pp xi-xxvi)

1. Parents are, and must be, their child's primary teacher, even if they aren't formally homeschooling. Per Trelease, "[Children] spend 900 hours a year in school and 7,800 hours outside school. Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change?" When I read that, two things come to mind: (a) Finnish educational success is probably because their teachers are so awesome, and (b) apparently educational success overall correlates to the mother's educational level. I don't even know what those two thoughts mean together, but that's what leaps to mind.
2. "Sooner is not better. Are the dinner guests who arrive an hour early better guests than whose who arrive on time? Of course not...There should be no rush to have your child reading before age six or seven...This book is not about raising precocious children. It's about raising children in love with print who want to keep on reading long after they graduate." In principle, I agree, but I had the experience of growing up with a brother whose learning disabilities were not identified until second grade. Getting him back up to speed took years of trauma and turmoil for the entire family, and he was never really able to "catch up" academically. My second brother had the same dyslexia, but I think earlier intervention helped him stay on track throughout school and he's now about to get a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Granted, these two brothers had very different personalities to start with, but because of my family's experience, I don't think reading instruction is something that should be left solely in the hands of professional educators at the time and place of the education system's choosing. I don't advocate rushing or pressuring, but I also think that waiting until age seven to start reading instruction is neither necessary nor wise. That said, I think Trelease and I are in agreement that for little ones, nurturing a love of books and stories is a great deal more important than phonics and spelling rules.
3. Trelease argues that reading aloud to your children is a sure-fire scheme for ensuring your child a lifetime of success, in school and beyond. I don't disagree, but I wish he hadn't followed up this assertion with an anecdote about a kid who got a perfect ACT "because" his fourth-generation-teacher mom read to him 30 minutes a night for his entire life. As much as I like this story, it is the epitome of anecdotal evidence, and it overvalues test results for their after-the-fact “marketing” value, which the author spends much of the rest of the book deriding (he is decidedly not a fan of NCLB). I Googled for “perfect SAT score 2011” and “perfect ACT score 2011” and all the kids were like “Uh yeah, I took six practice tests and I'm an overachiever anyway, so whatever.” The closest thing I could find that offered a similar paean to books is this video of this adorkable 12-year-old who got a perfect score on the math section. He's at least reading a book in the B-roll for the local news report on his achievement.
4. In a chart reporting the results of a study of kindergartners who evidenced either high or low interest in books, the attribute in which the kids most differed appears to be "Child is taken to library." 98.1 percent of those with a high interest in books were "taken to library", and only 7.1 percent of the kids with a low interest in books were "taken to library." Correlation? Causation? I don't care. My takeaway is "Take kid to library."
5. Book recommendation to note from this chapter: The Bears' House by Marilyn Sachs. Trelease mentions having an accidental 45-minute book lovefest with a bunch of sixth graders over this book, which got him thinking about "book reports" from adults to kids. "I'd piqued the children's interest simply giving them a book 'commercial.' " Trelease is very interested in "marketing" books and we'll discuss his other techniques as we encounter them later in the text. (Rain-gutter bookshelves haunt me! Do I need them? Where would I put them? Argh.)

Next up in my Read-Aloud Handbook readalong (same bat time, same bat channel, probably tomorrow night) is Chapter 1, Why Read Aloud?, which covers the following topics (section titles paraphrased by lazy me):

• Why is reading aloud effective?
• What's the deal with Finland's reading scores?
• What reliably creates a good reader?
• Phonics
• Background knowledge and vocabulary
• Why parents should read
• Using reading aloud with at-risk kids
• Preventing Alzheimer's disease with reading (sorta) (I told you I was paraphrasing)

I've also ordered a book from the library called Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. The Read-Aloud Handbook was the first place I encountered this research, but as I've gotten into "early childhood education" reading more and more, I've found the same results cited over and over again. I want to read the study for myself, and I'll discuss it in conjunction my review of chapter one, where Trelease summarizes the key points (pp. 14-16).