Literacy Blogs

Parents often ask how they can help their children learn to read; and it’s no wonder that they’re interested in this essential skill. Reading plays an important role in later school success. One study even demonstrates that how well 7-year-olds read predicts their income 35 years later! This article provides 11 practical recommendations for helping preschoolers and school-age students learn to read. 1. Teaching reading will only help. Sometimes, parents are told early teaching is harmful, but it isn’t true. You simply can’t introduce literacy too early. I started reading to my own children on the days they were each born! The “dangers of early teaching” ...

Last week a reporter contacted me. She wanted to know why we should encourage kids to read. Some of you might know that I am skeptical about a lot of the claims about reading. I certainly accept that idea that kids learn from reading (introspection alone should tell you that), but how much reading practice it takes to improve reading achievement is not exactly clear. Given that, I'm not exactly the poster boy for those who claim to be improving reading by getting kids to engage in it.   Nevertheless, I'm not against encouraging kids to read. Actually, I'm for it. The ...

As I've written here before, I serve on the Board of Directors of Reach Out and Read, one of the most valuable reading promoters in the world. This summer they have launched a campaign to give a brand-new, age-appropriate book to one million children in need before Labor Day. The Summer of a Million Books campaign unites Reach Out and Read pediatricians and family physicians at 4,500 hospitals and clinics across the country in their mission to prepare America’s youngest children to succeed in school. And you can help.   Reach Out and Read developed the Summer of a Million Books in ...

Blast from the Past: So much has changed since this was first posted 12 years ago, so I decided to update this. Then, supporting children’s summer reading was a nice thing to do, but these days it is critically important given how much face-to-face schooling kids have missed. I’ve added a few ideas here and provided a lot of useful link that are all up to date. Send this along to your favorite parents, teachers, and librarians. May 29, 2009 updated June 26, 2021 This is the time of the year when schools often try to reach out to parents to encourage ...

Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts released its new report, Reading on the rise: A new chapter in American literacy. Unlike its most recent previous efforts, this one, as the title suggests, is not a gloom-and-doomer about how American youth is going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, their new report is more consistent with comments I've made in this space than with their own earlier reports.   For the past 25 years, NEA has periodically surveyed American adults to find out about their literary reading habits (literary referring to fiction, poetry, drama, and the like). In 2002, they indicated that ...

In this morning’s New York Times, Motoko Rich (the Times cultural reporter) has a terrific article about reading on the Internet. This article is a continuation of a discussion Ms. Rich and I had awhile back about the National Endowment for the Arts’ study that claimed young people were no longer reading. I responded to that study by opining that survey respondents do not include their Internet reading time, even though they might be reading newspapers and books online. The Chicago Tribune followed up on that story at the time by interviewing Chicago area young people, and these young people both separated ...

There was more information on pleasure reading published this week in a report from Scholastic, a publisher with a deep financial interest in children’s and adolescent reading. This report, unlike other recent reports, does not paint such a bleak picture of the reading crisis in America. They interviewed more than 500 kids from preschool through age 17 and found that 90% of kids thought reading was important for learning, and that about 75% of kids indicated that they read for pleasure at least once a week (almost 25% claim to read every day). The major reason that they say they ...

          The National Endowment for the Arts report on reading habits in the U.S. continues to reverberate. This is a report that American journalists are fascinated by. As one reporter explained to me today, he was writing for an audience of literary writers (poets, novelists, and the like), and he indicated that the NEA report was discouraging to that audience. “They wonder if it is even worth writing a novel, if no one is going to read it.”            My skepticism about the NEA report is two-fold: first, I doubt that we are ...

          The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has done a great service by trying to monitor how much young people and adults are reading. http:Although I certainly agree with NEA on the importance of reading--especially extended reading of challenging and worthwhile text, and I suspect that NEA is right students and adults are doing less of such reading these days, I do have some disagreements with them.           One concern is that I think their measurement of amount of reading is likely flawed. People are notoriously bad at reporting how they spend their ...