Let Them Have Books

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................xiPreface......................................................................................xiiiPart One: Why Kids Should Read...............................................................1Chapter 1: Kids who read get a great deal from books.........................................3Chapter 2: Kids who read do well in school...................................................10Chapter 3: Kids who read become adults who read..............................................17Part Two: Why Kids Don't Read................................................................25Chapter 4: Some kids do not get the early literacy experience they need......................27Chapter 5: For some kids, learning to read is a struggle.....................................35Chapter 6: In school, many kids learn to hate to read........................................44Part Three: What Kids Need to Become Readers.................................................61Chapter 7: Kids need a full preliteracy experience...........................................63Chapter 8: Dyslexic kids need early recognition and targeted instruction.....................71Chapter 9: Kids need schools that foster a reading culture...................................80Appendix A: Books and Authors Mentioned......................................................93Appendix B: Further Resources Mentioned......................................................99Bibliography.................................................................................101Index........................................................................................111

Chapter One

An eight-year-old sits in a chair with her knees drawn up, nearing the end of The Sisters Grim, Book 2. She lifts her eyes from the page for a moment to gaze out her aunt's living room window. She is not looking out the window because she hears the joyful cries of the other children playing in the pool. Those eyes that gaze out the window are thinking eyes. With just a few pages left in her book, she has reached the resolution of the plot, and she is resolving in her own mind the sense of it.

Olivia was swimming earlier, playing a diving game, competing to see who could retrieve the most plastic rings that had been dropped along the bottom of the pool. At various moments, amid the shrieks and the splashing and the glorious summer sun, the memory of where she last left the story drifted into her conscious mind. The distinct characters with their burdens, their motivations, and their interactions weighed in and felt familiar. At some point, the excitement of the game ebbed just enough, and the desire to know what was going to happen next drew her back inside to finish her book.

Olivia will finish this book with a taste for more. When she goes home, her mother will have The Sisters Grim, Book 3 waiting for her. Olivia chooses the books she reads either from the library or from selections her mother makes available to her. She has already learned how to get the feel of a book by looking at the cover, reading the beginning, thumbing through the pages, and subconsciously matching up her own distinct intellectual quest with what she sees.

All summer, Olivia will immerse herself in reading. At the age when the hunger to know everything is at its freshest and most vibrant, she will find real treasure in the pages of books. At the age when reading a book at any time of the day, anywhere, and for any length of time triggers absolutely no guilt, Olivia will breeze through tens of thousands of pages, all the while increasing her understanding of the world and of herself and gaining facility with language. A passion for reading found here in the guiltless days of youth will never leave and will return in many forms and for many reasons throughout this child's life journey.

Reading is fun for Olivia, as it is for many children and adults. Part of the fun comes from the pleasure of experiencing and gratifying an innate yearning to find out what is going to happen next. A good story ratchets up the yearning and then delivers the pleasure of resolution. Another part comes from the fulfillment of another strong and innate yearning: the desire to know more about our world.

Reading hasn't always been fun for Olivia. At the beginning of the first grade, she asked me when I thought most kids learned to read. With tears in her eyes, she told me she didn't think she would be able to learn. Before she went to school, Olivia had loved books. There was no activity she would not drop, given the opportunity to have a book read to her. Amazed for many years at their young daughter's natural intelligence, Olivia's parents expected she would have no trouble learning to read, and Olivia eagerly anticipated going to school, where she knew she would learn to read. Initially confident in her own intelligence, she soon began to sense there was something she did not have, something that was keeping her from being able to learn. She came home one day late in the school year and told her surprised mother that she and two boys in her class were being pulled out of class to get extra help in reading.

After getting vague answers to their questions from the school, Olivia's parents took the matter into their own hands and immediately had Olivia privately tested. When the tests revealed a high intelligence paired with a weakness in several, but not all, of the indicators of a neurobiological reading difficulty, they made appointments for remediation. By the time she entered second grade, Olivia was finishing up visual exercises and a series of computer games designed to strengthen her processing speed (ability to rapidly integrate and memorize symbols and words) and associative memory (ability to store and retrieve newly learned information in the process of thinking).

The trauma of Olivia's first year with reading lingered into her second year. She read short grade-level books easily, but they did not inspire her. She did gain confidence in her own ability to read, and her parents continued to read to her. In the spring, her mother began reading aloud from Into the Wild, the first book of the Warriors Saga, by Erin Hunter. After a couple of chapters, Olivia took the book to bed with her. She had hopped aboard the reading train.

Summer came and Olivia, then age eight, read at every opportunity. As all good readers do, Olivia read to learn about how others think and feel and handle an infinite range of emotions and situations. She read to learn about the wider world, its present, its past, and its potential future. She read to know more about herself—what moved her, what she cared about, what seemed right to her, and what seemed wrong. She read to enjoy the transport too—the sense of being carried away to another, temporary reality and of living vicariously. As a reader, she also gained a strong sense of independence as the steward of her own intellectual discovery, capable of drawing on a reserve of the experiences of others to make choices and meet challenges.

School started again, and Olivia continued to read for fun. By midyear, her teacher no longer required her to bring in the signed letter from her parents each...