Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  What to Do at Home

  The last section ended with a pretty sobering set of statistics about time spent on content knowledge in schools. In chapter 5, I encouraged you to count on your child’s teacher to get him reading, but when it comes to knowledge building, you can’t exhort the schools and hope for the best. This work will fall to you. In chapter 3, I described desirable practices meant to spark interest in knowledge—those are still desirable. But as kids get older, some of the activities take a different shape.

  Talking

  You still want to ask your child questions, of course, but as they grow, you can expect them to provide longer answers and you can pose more open-ended questions. The most natural thing to ask about is what happened at school. You’ll get social stuff in response—what happened at recess or at lunch. That’s fine, but it’s nice to know about the rest of the day (which also gives you the chance to express interest in what he learned—not just because he’s the one learning it, but because you find the topic itself interesting). “What else happened?” will likely draw a blank look. The best strategy is to pose a more specific question. For example, if you know that the class writes in response to a teacher-generated prompt for five minutes each day, ask, “What was the writing prompt today?” So that means it pays to know something about the specifics of what’s happening in the classroom, information you might glean from a classroom newsletter or website or from back-to-school night. Or, better, talk to the teacher about it.

  I think children learn a couple of things from telling you about their day. They get practice in telling a story, in putting their thoughts together and relating what happened in a way that has a beginning, middle, and end. So even if the playground drama of first-grade alliances is not what you meant when you asked what happened at school, bear in mind that your child is getting some benefit from telling you this story. And she’ll get even more if you pay attention, ask questions, and feign confusion if she’s not telling the story in a logical sequence.

  In addition to providing feedback about your child’s storytelling, show him how it’s done. Tell your own stories. This is a marvelous age at which children understand that you were once young, and they generally find it fascinating to hear about your life. Hearing your stories provides a model, and there is often more background information in them than you would think. My father told me countless stories about his boyhood in Rome, Georgia, in the 1930s—stories about games of capture the flag in the alleyways among downtown buildings; stories of lying, sleepless, on sweat-soaked sheets on July nights, waiting for the brief, relieving breeze brought by the oscillating fan; and the story that became the town sensation one summer: a teen dared a soda jerk holding a butcher knife to chop off his finger, certain that the soda jerk would chicken out, whereupon the soda jerk, certain that the teen would pull his hand away at the last moment, chopped off the finger. In addition to bringing me closer to my father and learning something about how to weave a good narrative, those stories taught me what alleyways, oscillating fans, and soda jerks are.

  Reading

  Naturally you should continue reading to your child. Don’t quit because your child can read or because your child now reads to you. Remember, when he was little, you read to you him not because he couldn’t do it himself but because it was a pleasurable way to spend time together. That hasn’t changed. And given that learning to decode inevitably entails some struggle, read-alouds are the time to remind him that reading brings joy. Then, too, as your child grows in ability to follow and appreciate more complex narrative, there’s a greater chance to introduce books that you enjoy.

  In chapter 3 I suggested that read-alouds for young children could include nonfiction. Some children immediately take to fact-filled books—one seven-year-old told me in a grave voice, “I like books with information”—but others don’t. This is a good age to give nonfiction another try, because your child has probably developed some personal interest that can guide your selection of a nonfiction book: soccer, bugs, ballet, whatever. There are terrific books that are still loaded with pictures like those targeted to younger kids, but with richer text.

  Certain topics dominate nonfiction at this age: animals, weather, historical subjects. Another idea is to try a picture-rich book related to a game that your child loves, even if the text is beyond her. If she loves Barbie, why not a book on the history of Barbie fashions? If your child loves gross-out toys, how about Nick Arnold’s Disgusting Digestion? The Hexbug enthusiast might enjoy the Eyewitness: Robots book. If you’re at the library and these ideas elicit little interest from your child, get a book on the subject that your child hasn’t yet seen and drop it in his bathroom book basket without mentioning it. You never know. (Or if your kids are like mine, pretend the book is yours and leave it in your bathroom book basket, which will make it more attractive.)

  Playing

  On the subject of games, some board games are useful sources of background knowledge. I’m not talking about “games” that are really drill sessions in phonics or number facts dressed up to look like games. These merit the disdainful descriptor “chocolate-covered broccoli.” But some games are genuine fun and require knowledge as part of their play: The Scrambled States of America for US geography, for example, Apples to Apples Junior for vocabulary, and Scrabble Junior for spelling. I especially like games that don’t demand knowledge to play, but expose kids to it incidentally. Zeus on the Loose uses Greek gods as characters. In Masterpiece the point is to collect valuable art, and the works depicted are classics of the Western canon. 20th Century Time Travel is a rummy-like card game, with history facts on the cards, not unlike the classic card game Authors. You do have to exercise some caution, as many games claim to be educational. If there are dice, then it’s a counting game. If it requires sorting, then kids are finding patterns.

  Home-grown word games can still be good fun, but are likely to change as kids get older. They’ve probably outgrown phonological awareness rhyme games, but now know enough words for vocabulary games. My kids like to keep it simple: I say a word and they are to guess the synonym I am thinking of. Remember the old game show Password? That’s basically it. Sometimes they give the clue and I guess, but the other arrangement is easier for them; words that are hard to bring to mind are easily recognized when someone else says them. More challenging is the two-word version. I think of two words that rhyme, and then provide a descriptive phrase, for example, “What do you call it when your trousers do the waltz?” A pants dance.

  My wife plays another version of the synonym game with the kids in her class that they have dubbed “Say It Again, Sam.” It can be played by kids of varying ages. Someone starts by saying any sentence, for example, “This cupcake has pink frosting.” Each player then rephrases the original sentence. A five-year-old might say, “This small cake has pink frosting.” A ten-year-old might be more ambitious in trying to avoid repetition of the original and say, “The small cake before me is covered in a mixture of sugar and butter that looks light red.” Kids can get surprisingly creative (and surprisingly funny) when they get absorbed in this game.

  Gaining Independence

  As your child learns to decode and gains fluency and confidence, you’ll want to start teaching her to do on her own things that you have, until now, done for her. Indeed, she’ll want to do those things herself. When a word needs a sharper definition or a fact is in dispute, you have made a habit of finding the needed information in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Now is a good time to buy your child her own kid-friendly reference books. But remember, it’s not obvious to the neophyte how to use these books. She’ll need your guidance.

  These fledgling research skills can also be practiced when you plan a family trip. Going to Disneyworld? Let’s get out the globe and find Orlando. How can we find out what the weather will be like so we can pack the right clothing? Why is it so warm in Orlando if it’s so cold here? And so on. Even if you’re taking just a day trip, find your destination on a map and read up
a bit about where you’re going (figure 6.7).

  Figure 6.7. Buy a globe. Globes seem old-fashioned in the age of the web, and they are not cheap—a decent one will set you back fifty dollars or more. But I think they are a good investment. There is no substitute for a globe to give your child a sense of geographic distance. And your child will make surprising discoveries (the United States isn’t bigger? Lichtenstein is a country?) for years.

  Source: © Christian Fischer—Fotolia.

  Another sure sign of your child’s independence: she’s ready for her own magazine subscription. That offers a triple thrill: (1) there are a lot of terrific magazines for kids, (2) having her own subscription is a sign of being more grown up, and (3) everybody loves getting mail. Check out Ladybug, Click, Highlights, National Geographic Kids, Ranger Rick (and Ranger Rick, Jr.), Kind News (primary), Mocomi, Your Big Backyard, New Moon, Our Little Earth, Nickelodeon, Sports Illustrated Kids, American Girl, Stone Soup, and Time for Kids.

  Magazines not only build knowledge, they will, we hope, keep kids motivated to read. In the next chapter we’ll consider other measures to maintain the motivation of early elementary readers.

  Keeping It Simple Summary

  At School

  Substantive learning in science, geography, history, drama, civics, music, and art becomes part of school.

  At Home

  Keep doing what you’ve been doing, but with changes that reflect your child’s increasing maturity and independence.

  Tell stories to and elicit stories from your child.

  Consider a greater proportion of nonfiction in your read-alouds and choices for your child’s reading.

  Notes

  “‘Two birds sat on a branch. An open birdcage sat beneath them.’”: Barclay, Bransford, Franks, McCarrell, and Nitsch (1974).

  The Carol Harris story is from Sulin and Dooling (1974).

  “tend not to be heavy on ideas”: Duke (2000); Moss (2008); Pentimonti, Zucker, Justice, and Kaderavek (2010).

  “My reply will necessarily be brief, but here goes.”: For a review, see Willingham (2008).

  “a couple of studies from the early 2000s”: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Early Child Care Research Network (2002, 2005).

  “and recent smaller-scale studies support this general conclusion”: Baniflower et al. (2013); Claessens, Engel, and Curran (2013).

  aThese data are unfortunately a bit old now; they were collected in 1997–1999 (first grade) and 1999–2001 (third grade). But I don’t know many teachers or administrators who think that No Child Left Behind has decreased the emphasis on reading and math, and recent smaller-scale studies support this general conclusion.

  Chapter 7

  Preventing a Motivation Backslide

  In the introduction, I cited a depressing statistic: although the average child’s attitude toward reading is positive in early elementary school, it gets more negative year by year. By puberty, the typical kid is indifferent toward reading or even feels a bit negative. The early elementary years, when children are still mostly positive about reading, is the time to think about how to prevent this decline.

  What’s Happening at School

  In the early elementary years, children begin to read themselves, not just to listen to others read to them. In addition, they have a classroom of other kids to whom they might compare their reading achievement. These constitute new contributors to reading self-concept and reading attitudes.

  Self-Concept

  Young children (say, age four or five) tend to see themselves as good at everything; they are smart, strong, and accomplished, and they are usually eager to offer evidence, such as their ability to swing really high and sing the ABC song (whether or not they actually know the whole thing). At the same time, their self-concept tends to be very concrete: being smart, for example, means being able to sing the ABC song.

  As kids get older, say age seven or eight, self-concepts become increasingly abstract. Being “smart” is not just a matter of one or another accomplishment; kids understand “smart” as something that integrates many behaviors. They begin to splice diverse experiences into a narrative that describes who they are. And by this age, self-concept is no longer a frenzy of self-congratulation. Kids begin to understand that they have some positive qualities but lack others. They come to this understanding through comparison. They see that although they thought they were fast and strong, other kids can swing higher and run faster than they can (figure 7.1).

  Figure 7.1. My sister’s first-grade artwork. My sister brought home drawings from first grade, and my mother thought she was a prodigy. My sister, comparing her work to her classmates, insisted it was nothing special. My mother thought she was being modest, but after attending back-to-school night (and seeing the drawings that other kids had done), my mother reported to my father, “She was right.”

  Source: © Sherry Lotan.

  Reading Self-Concept

  Small children get their sense of themselves as readers from their understanding that reading is a family value and also from being read to and enjoying it. Whether they are a good reader does not contribute to their self-concept—they aren’t reading by themselves yet, and their self-assessments would, in any event, not be very realistic.

  But in the early elementary years, kids compare their reading progress with others in the class, and that will contribute to their reading self-concept, for better or worse. These comparisons are often made easier because teachers group children of similar reading accomplishment so that they can read texts of similar difficulty. Teachers won’t call them “smarties” and “dullards,” but even first graders won’t miss that everybody in the “bluebirds” group decodes better than everybody in the “robins” group.

  It’s no small matter to keep up the motivation and self-image of kids who can plainly perceive that their reading isn’t going well. The best recipe seems to be equal parts of celebration of individual children’s success, along with emotional support: acknowledgment that it’s a tough thing that he’s learning, coupled with full confidence that he can do it.

  Curriculum as a Self-Concept Amplifier

  As someone who came to educational research later in my career, I’m sometimes asked what surprised me most about schooling when I started researching it. What struck me was the difference in the attitudes of students in kindergarten and students in fourth grade. (I’m not talking about research here, but about my observations in classrooms.) Kindergarten students, almost without exception, are happy to be there. Naturally they get bored or frustrated with this or that activity, but they are always game for whatever comes next. Not so fourth graders. After ten minutes in most fourth-grade classrooms, it’s obvious to me which students do not view school as a place of opportunity and excitement but instead as a place where they fail and feel shame. When I’ve mentioned this observation to early elementary teachers, they often say, “You see it in fourth graders. We see it in second and even first graders.” I am sure they are right.

  I think there is a tie to literacy. Consider a child who finds learning to decode difficult. It’s not lost on him that he struggles in a way that his classmates do not. Naturally this child will be dejected about reading, but consider that most of the time students spend in school is devoted to English language arts. If a student has a terrible time with reading, why wouldn’t he conclude that school is just not for him? In chapter 6, I suggested that broadening the curriculum is crucial to build general knowledge, but making more space for other subjects in kindergarten may also pay off in motivation. The child who is struggling with reading may still dread it, but he knows that science is coming later, or history, or drama, and so his academic self-image stays more positive.

  Attitudes

  If children start school with positive reading attitudes but these attitudes slip year by year, then we want to be darn sure we know everything we can about what factors could be leading to the slide. There has been substantial research on the tw
o classroom factors that seem most likely to have an impact: the type of instruction the child experiences and the teacher.

  Instruction and Motivation

  Phonics instruction seems really boring. It’s rote memorization, devoid of meaning, and thus seems bound to make kids think reading is dull work. But research doesn’t support that reasonable supposition. The particular way kids are taught to decode—phonics or whole-word instruction—doesn’t affect attitudes. It may be that when kids are starting out, even reading disconnected words is somewhat rewarding. They might be excited to engage in this activity that they associate with older kids and grown-ups. It also may be that the materials used for whole-word instruction are not that exciting either (figure 7.2).

  Figure 7.2. Whole-word reader. This page is taken from a book meant to be used with whole-word instruction. Even if your intent is that children plunge into exciting stories, they can’t recognize enough words to construct a gripping tale when they are just learning to read.