There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That’s developmentally the natural time.
More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.
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. Fo...
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...
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,...
The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared
Sector 7 by David Wiesner (Clarion, 1997)
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...
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...
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.
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...
What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
You need the combination of know-how and motivation.
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.