Reading: How Parents Can Help
Everyone Has Reading Homework
The Heroes are committed to helping every boy and girl establish the habits of a reader and a lifelong love of books. Students must bring books of their choice to class each day. The goal is a half an hour of home reading for each child every afternoon or evening, at least five days per week. In our language arts classroom, students are reading independently for twenty minutes per school day. Hopefully, reading will become a daily habit.
There is no more important homework than reading. Research shows that the highest achieving students are those who devote leisure time to reading, even when the school day and year are only mid-length and homework isn’t excessive. Recently, the largest-ever international study of reading found that the single most important predictor of academic success is the amount of time children spend reading books, more important even than economic or social status. And one of the few predictors of high achievement in math and science is that amount of time children devote to pleasure reading.
Children read in order to become smarter about the world and how it works. They read to broaden their vocabularies and to become better readers – faster and more fluent, purposeful, engaged, critical, and satisfied. They read to stretch their imaginations, to escape to other lives, times, and places. And they read to become good people – knowledgeable about and compassionate toward the range of human experience.
There is no substitute for regular, sustained time with books. Please sit down with your child in the next day and talk about the best time and place for reading to happen at your house. Is after school and before dinner a good point to catch his or her breath and escape into a great story? Or will your child join the book lovers who like to read ourselves to sleep at night? And whenever the reading happens, is the environment quiet? Is the TV off? And is there a good light?
We’ve learned that the choices of books available to kids today are so wonderful that reading makes for joyful homework. We’ve also seen that children whose parents and teachers expect and encourage them to read are likely to grow up as happy, skilled readers.
Three Kinds of Books
The books that children read fall into three categories of difficulty. Holidays are easy first reads or old favorites: a book a student has read many times before or one he or she picks up to take a break from harder books. Just Rights are new books that help a reader practice and gain experience – they contain a few words per page that they child doesn’t know. Challenges are titles that a child would like to read independently but that are too difficult right now. There may be too many unfamiliar words, text that’s too dense, paragraphs that are too long, a plot or structure that’s difficult to follow, multiple main characters, or concepts that the child can’t grasp yet.
We appreciate these definitions because they label books, not students. All readers of every age have our own Holidays, Just Rights, and Challenges. Often, as we learn more about a topic, work with a particular text, or just gain more experience as readers, a Challenge can become a Just Right. At school we watch as students make so much progress over the course of a year that a title they could only listen to in September becomes- over time and with practice – a book they read smoothly, with understanding and confidence in June.
Children should spend some time at home with all three categories of books, but most of their time should be spent with Just Rights, because these are the books that help students learn the most, about reading and about the topics they want to read about.
Some time should be spent with Holidays , the help children gain confidence, increase their reading rate, revisit old friends, and read for pure pleasure.
Finally, children should spend a little time with Challenges, because these often tell stories or convey information that children want and can figure out with our help – and because they show students the books that are out there waiting for them as readers.
When your child reads – silently, to you, or with you – ask about the book: Is it a Holiday? A Just Right? A Challenge? If it’s a Just Right or a Challenge, be ready to provide help with unfamiliar words or concepts. And, again, bear in mind that readers shouldn’t spend all their time with just one kind of book. Children need experience with materials of varying degrees of difficulty if they are to grow to independence as readers and understand all the things that reading is good for.
Reading Aloud
Please don’t ever consider your child too old to be read to. Children of every age cherish the literary worlds that adults bring to life with our voices. When you read stories aloud, it’s helpful if you can select books from all three categories of difficulty, not just Challenges or chapter books. Feel free in your family to enjoy different kinds of stories and good writing.
Final Thoughts
Your child may select a book with content or themes that you question. While we know it’s essential that children choose what they read, we also believe that your values matter. If a book bothers you and you feel strongly about it, ask your child not to bring it home, explain why, and talk with his or her teacher. As we build a classroom library, we select books with many criteria in mind, from classic literature to predictable language and story structures to award-winning illustrations to cross-cultural themes to contemporary social issues. We’re always happy to explain the merits we have found in a particular title, but we also want to support you if you have concerns about a book choice your child has made.
Throughout the school year, please make it a priority to assist your child in finding books they enjoy. We will be working with each child here at school to develop a personal list of books they want to read and will do our best to make those books accessible through our school or classroom libraries. Taking your child to the public library regularly and spending some quality time there will also be of great assistance.
In class, we make time for looking at books, listening to books, talking about the ideas and people in books, and learning how to read books. We offer students the most generous invitations we can devise to help them fall in love with books, see themselves as readers, spend significant time reading, and grow strong.
We look forward to partnering with you as adults who nurture readers.
Source: Atwell, N. (2007) The Reading Zone. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc.
Last updated: 10/03/2007