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 what we make them learn." The fact is that some children learn to read sooner than others, while some learn better than others. There is a difference. For the parent who thinks that sooner is better, who has an eighteen-month-old child barkin..
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. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to.
What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?" Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child."
So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.
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 Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just..
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 book and spend twenty minutes with the author, someone they've never met. The better she knows her students and authors or books, the more successful will be the "matchmaking." But the teacher (or librarian) who doesn't read much will fail for s..
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.
the great ones--you can still taste them years later, even remember the exact spot where you met them. You can't always put your finger on why they linger with you, but they do.
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 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.
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. 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.
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, Moses, and Jesus--have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart.
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 someone or something to blame. Sound familiar? Since SAT scores had been in a twenty-year decline (because lots of average and below-average students, and not just the rich kids, were taking the
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 of just hear it.
The brainstorm became known as eCAP (El Crystal Audiobook Project) and added up to sixty iPod kits (from grant money), along with six hundred audiobooks. When a teacher identifies a non-proficient reader, she sits down with the student and they construct a fifteen-book playlist from the school's master list and load it into an iPod. The kit that accompanies it includes the book's text, a charger, headphones, and any necessary instructions. ..
Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers--900 and 7,800--will appear over and over in this book.
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 formative periods of their intellectual and emotional lives are interrupted 118 times a day for messages, totaling 90 minutes.
Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547..