“Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.” W.B. Yeates
I want to ignite my students’ love of reading. Moreover, I want to set them up for success, and thus my goal every year is to create a classroom of readers. But first, they need buy-in. So, I saturate them daily with the why.
Here are two biggies:
- As Jim Trelease, author of “The Read-Aloud Handbook,” articulated, “A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation…the literate and illiterate.” It can be surmised that strong readers can be more empowered to make some of the right choices in life.
- Literacy and the Police (2008) claim that “literacy equals crime prevention.” They continue by saying that in neighborhoods, the lower the literacy, the higher the crime rates. This is why effort is put into implementing literacy programs in low-income areas.
My students can’t dispute these statistics, so I argue that they should start reading more and more books. I can influence them through daily reading aloud. I’ve witnessed the power of reading aloud to my own child and it is no different in my classroom. The serendipity of reading aloud is in the accomplishment of satisfying the Common Core standards such as, “Children’s listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension until the middle school years” (CCSS, Appendix A, p. 27). For older students, when reading aloud is coupled with conversations, we satisfy the standard stating, “Children benefit from structured conversations with an adult in response to written texts” (CCSS, Appendix A, p. 27).
Regardless of the age of the students, reading out loud to them will have an immense impact on not only their own ability to read well but also on their love of reading. Jim Trelease agrees when he says, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”
