Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head—by reading.
This is not a book about teaching a child how to read; it's about teaching a child to want to read. There's an education adage that goes, What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh...
There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That’s developmentally the natural time.
The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.
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. Ch...
Of those differences, there are some things that remain the same. In 1982, the U.S. economy was in its worst recession since the Great Depression, and the nation’s business leaders were looking for so...
More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.
Children’s books, even good picture books, are much richer than ordinary home or classroom conversation,
Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don’t meet your high standards.
Visual receptors in the brain outnumber auditory receptors 30:1.32 In other words, the chances of a word (or sentence) being retained in our memory bank are thirty times greater if we see it instead o...
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,...
From 2,272 text messages a month in 2008, American teenagers (ages 13–17) ballooned to 3,339 messages a month in 2010, an average of six per waking hour. Simply put, students in one of the most format...
What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you fix the schools, they'll fix the kids. So, in...
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...
When someone becomes a teacher, she’s like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. All year long she’s trying to entice students to go out on dates with authors—that is, to pick up this book or that bo...