How important is parental involvement once a child learns how to read?
June 21, 2010
I just had the pleasure of doing a training with community workers who are involved with promoting and supporting early literacy with children and their families, making sure these children enter school, ready to be successful learners and readers.
Parental involvement is essential to a child’s success in school, and it makes perfect sense how their involvement is a crucial factor in meting the challenges all schools face in educating the next generation of children. See “Parent volunteers lift San Jose schools” SF Chronicle, June 6, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgif=/c/a/2010/06/05/INT01DO3E0.DTL
Additional evidence that supports the importance of parental involvement as it relates to reading comes from “The Kids and Family Reading Report”, which shows that “kids’ reading drops off after eight years, and that parents can have a direct impact on getting kids to read . . . When kids start reading independently, parents need to become more, not less, involved . . . parents must play a key role in helping their older children select books that capture their imagination and interest . . . Kids say that one of the main reasons why they do not read more is because they cannot find books that they like to read.” Simply put? If pleasure doesn’t drive reading, children don’t become readers.
Some guidelines on involvement:
• DO NOT stop reading to children once they learn to read on their own!
• Reading aloud does not automatically lead to literacy. The real link lies in the verbal interaction that occurs between adult and child during story reading.
• Children who talk about stories better understand what they read.
• Children who understand a story become more confident readers. Children need confidence to be good readers.
• Children who come to school with well-developed skills in “taking meaning from books” are clearly at an advantage. Someone in the home read to the children, answered their questions, and encouraged them to read and write.
Questions to ponder:
~ Who helps your child choose the books they read?
~ Do you read some of the books your child reads?
~ Do you talk about the story once the books are finished?
~ Is your child reading books that are not school assignments?
A poem to share~
When I was little, mom would read to me in bed.
I’d lie under the covers with my eyes closed
And the sound of her voice would make me feel safe and sleepy at the same time.
Sometimes, even with the good stories, I’d fall asleep before the end.
Now I’m bigger and I can read by myself but still, every once in a while, when I’m feeling sad or something,
I’ll ask Mom and she’ll come in and sit on the edge of the bed
and touch my head
And read to me again.
(Poet unknown)
“Children more likely to own a mobile phone than a book.” Can this be true?
June 11, 2010
A survey of 17,000 schoolchildren by the National Literacy Trust found that “85.5% of pupils had their own mobile phone, compared with 72.6% who had their own books,” the Telegraph reported. The disclosure follows the publication of a study which found that keeping just 20 books in the home could boost children’s chances of doing well […]
Summertime and reading~ thoughts to ponder.
May 18, 2010
As we get closer to Memorial Day, the end of the school year looms large and brings us to the subject of summertime reading. There are more than enough lists of book recommendations and summer reading program than we know what to do with, so let’s take a moment to contemplate the subject of children […]
A must share from one of my favorite authors—Phillip Pullman
May 6, 2010
“As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don’t think it’s the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means. The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the reader’s mind. So when people ask me […]
Good-bye to national poetry month, but not good-bye to poetry!
April 30, 2010
A favorite poem from my childhood—and it continues to conjure up wonderful feelings of swinging higher and higher! The Swing, by Robert Louis Stevenson How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in […]
