You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child. ~ Dr. Seuss
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Parking a kid in front of Sesame Street doesn’t teach reading proficiency, and it's not a teacher's job to teach a kid how to read.
It's a parent's job to teach their kid how to read. The parent is the first teacher, and the teaching of reading as a life-skill is as critical as explaining fire, gravity, how to cross the street and how not to drown.
Nestled in the warm cocoon of the one person in the world they absolutely adore, a kid's mindset is bliss when being read to. Her imagination is incendiary. Sharing mindlight, embraced in the timbre of her parent's voice, feeling its vibration thrum into her little body, intimately conveys what it is to read and how it is to read, demonstrating reading’s ease-into-transcendence while hard-wiring her head with a built-in correlation of reading with love. A love of reading is a strong secondary. Primarily, this is love in the active tense.
In their lifelong habit of reading, there will always remain an essence of this sacred memory, strong enough to free their minds from peer pressure and self-loathing, strong enough to carry them through insecurity, withstand adversity, and beat back insanity.
If your child didn't experience this blissful communion when his sentience was expanding like the universe, all is not lost. Just because your kid doesn’t read well right now doesn't necessarily mean his life is on a pathway to underachievement and mediocrity.
For the beleaguered parent in fear of reading-failure, OHIB is a unique experience. Think of it as training wheels. Water wings. Think of it as making up for lost time.
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from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar04/vol61/num06/The-Science-of-Reading-Research.aspx
How Does Reading Develop?
Learning to read is a relatively lengthy process that begins very early in development, before children enter formal schooling. The quantity and quality of language and early literacy interactions during the preschool years profoundly affect the acquisition of the language building blocks that support skilled reading (Snow et al., 1998). As noted in all of the NAEP reading results for the past quarter of a century, reading failure is most prevalent among children from disadvantaged environments. The gap between these children and their more affluent peers begins early. Lonigan (2003) found that low-income preschool children were significantly less adept at identifying and manipulating the sound structure of language—a skill known as phonological sensitivity—than were middle- and high-income children. Low-income children also experienced significantly less growth in knowledge of phonemes, letter names, and letter sounds. Vocabulary development, phonological sensitivity, and alphabetic skills are extremely strong predictors of later reading proficiency; typically, children from low socioeconomic backgrounds lag woefully in these abilities (Snow et al., 1998).
The major reason for these gaps, particularly in vocabulary, is that children growing up in low-income environments engage in significantly fewer language and literacy interactions during the preschool years (Hersch, 2001; Snow et al., 1998). Hart and Risley (2003) found that the average child on welfare had half as much experience listening and speaking to parents (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour), and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour). Unfortunately, preschool programs for low-income children, such as Head Start, rarely address these gaps (Whitehurst, 2001).
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from the ‘Books That Made Me’ section of The Guardian of 26apr19, novelist Fatima Bhutto recalling ‘My earliest reading memory’: “My father, Murtaza, used to read to me when I was a child, with accents, voices, the works. He took me to the library for the first time, which was in my school. He treated the occasion like a pilgrimage, like we were embarking on something holy. I chose a small book and sat in a corner of the floor of the Damascus Community School library to read. He sat on a chair somewhere and read the newspaper till I finished.”
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