Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook

by Jim Trelease

“The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”2

It’s nearly impossible to understand a word in print if you’ve never said the word.

And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral, the child who has the most extensive vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with the smallest vocabulary will grasp the least.

In 2002, only 46.7 percent of adults had read any fiction in the previous year with the rate dropping to 43.1 percent in 2015.19 Parents’ reading attitudes and behaviors appear to be shared by their children.20 When parents read for pleasure, it impacts their child’s desire to do the same.

In an international study of 150,000 fourth graders, researchers found that students who were read to “often” at home scored thirty points higher than students who were read to “sometimes.”29 It stands to reason that the more often a child is read to, the more words are heard (bringing the child closer to comprehending more), and the more likely it is the child will associate reading with a daily pleasure experience.

What motivates children and adults to read more is that (1) they like the experience, (2) they like the subject matter, and (3) they like and follow the lead of people who read a lot.

Children in care outside the home are read aloud to an average of 1.5 minutes per day.

The previously mentioned 2016 national survey conducted by Scholastic found that only 17 percent of parents were still reading to their children after age nine.17 Was this because children didn’t want to be read to anymore? According to the report, 87 percent of children ages six through eleven said they liked being read to and wished their parents would continue. This incredible bonding experience between parent and child, teacher and student, should remain not only for enjoyment but also for all the reasons cited for why we read aloud. These include increasing vocabulary, introducing children to books beyond their listening level but above their reading level, and promoting reading enjoyment.

At age six, your child is a beginning reader. As such, she has a limited number of words she can decode by sight or sound. But she is not a beginning listener. She’s been listening for six years; she’s a veteran listener!

For many people (though not all), reading needs to be a social experience, giving them the chance to share their feelings about the book and critique its characters.

The strange thing about “reluctant reading daddies” is they’re found at all education levels. When poverty-level families and university-educated families were compared, fathers in both groups read to their children only 15 percent of the time, mothers 76 percent, and others 9 percent.

There is a thirty-to-one ratio of visual receptors over auditory receptors in the brain. The chances of a word (or sentence) being retained in our memory bank are thirty times greater if we see it instead of only hearing it.

By reading, reading, and reading. The best way to learn vocabulary and spelling is not by looking up words in the dictionary.

I’ve never met a strong writer who wasn’t also an avid reader. Good writers are like baseball players. Baseball players have to play regularly, but they spend most of their time in the dugout, watching others run, hit, catch, and throw.

So how do we educate the heart? There are only two ways: life experience and stories about life experiences, which is called literature.