It seems that these days every news or scholarly article about literacy development contains the word “skills.” Reading and writing skills, to be exact. We want to teach children to read and write, but instead we teach reading and writing SKILLS. What’s up with that? I believe it’s because skills are easier to measure than lifelong learning habits. Skills get attention because […]
Culture is everything in creating family connection. Members of most cultures share values and commonly admired lifestyles to which others in the same culture aspire. In multi-cultural settings like the United States of America or Canada where hundreds of languages and cultures create a shared community, it is difficult to assess a single value placed on […]
My neighbor’s kids gave her a truly precious puppy for her 85th birthday. Right. My thought exactly. Why not a sweet, older, house-trained dog?! But she seems thrilled and has escape proofed her picket-fenced yard with chicken wire and filled it with balls to entertain Coco. As we observed her active new companion, my wife and I […]
Children signal a preparedness to learn to read and write by carefully observing what older kids and adults do and then asking questions. They carefully observe mature models of literate behavior who make themselves available during daily reading times and in the sharing of letters and birthday cards. Writing interest is reflected in children’s curiosity […]
Children and adults that bemoan being poor readers and/or writers seem to have either missed out on or forgotten the golden rule of human learning. While nothing a human does ever makes things perfect, despite what the old saying says, enjoyable practice always leads to improvement. Always. Erin never was and never will be a particularly good […]
In Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451, those hoping to save books and literacy from a government that would destroy all printed sources from the past memorized entire books. Imagine memorizing your favorite book. Maybe it has thousands of pages with tens of thousands of words! As it turns out, book memorization is quite common. New, young readers are […]
For children, especially very young children, lap-time literacy experiences can offer powerful and usually positive contributions to their social-emotional development. Conversely, the language and informational richness of books don’t benefit a child much unless books are opened, explored, read and discussed with a caregiver. Such sharing forms a critical basis for positioning books to contribute to […]
What do kids notice as they read? That’s a key question that will help parents and teachers understand what their kids comprehend and what hasn’t yet grabbed their attention. What did you notice about the dog? What did you notice about yourself as a reader as you read this book? What did you notice about how the […]
The older kids get, the bigger their books get. And the bigger their books get, the deeper and wider their content gets. At some point, this wonderful pattern brings children to the possibly surprising conclusion that one cannot read every book cover to cover at one sitting. This natural conclusion, given the laws of time and space, […]
The ability to understand characters’ points of view is fundamental to higher-level reading comprehension. How might we teach that to young readers? Babies seem to be born with a natural empathetic response. If they see another baby cry, they may start crying in harmony, or if they see someone laughing, they may smile and giggle […]
