A child’s love of
language starts in the home. Playing rhyming
games, talking at the dinner table, and reading
together are all critical ways in which parents
nurture reading skills. Once your child enters
school, your role doesn’t end – it merely
changes. To make sure children become strong
readers, parents need to coach, monitor and
advocate for quality reading instruction.
As much as 20 percent of school
age children have difficulty learning to read.
However, if the right kind of good, intensive,
explicit instruction and intervention are
provided, that number can be reduced to as
little as 5 percent.
There is now scientific evidence
about the best ways to teach reading, based on
extensive research from the National Reading
Panel. After reviewing thousands of research
studies on reading, holding public hearings, and
consulting with leading educational
organizations, this panel came out with
recommendations that emphasize the importance of
teaching phonics skills and phonemic awareness,
as well as fluency and reading comprehension.
While the research was released more than two
years ago, many parents aren’t aware of the
finding and schools haven’t adopted these proven
methods.
“Change is generally a slow
process and changing curriculum means buying new
materials and many schools are strapped,” says
Peggy McCardle Associate Chief, Child
Development and Behavior Branch, National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
It can also be threatening. “We need to convince
teachers that change is a good and important
thing.”
Once given the curriculum, teacher
must know how to best teach it. Therefore,
training needs to be reformed to reflect these
best practices in reading instruction.
To advocate for sound reading
instruction, parents can work with the school
and parent-teacher organizations to inform them
about the new research on reading (see resource
box for web sites with parent and teacher
guides) and support professional development for
teachers.
Make sure your school is doing all
it can to track your child’s reading
development. The longer a reading problem goes
undetected, the more difficult it is to correct.
“It’s critical that parents follow
their child’s progress and know objective
reading benchmarks for kids,” says Susan Hall,
co-author of Parenting a Struggling
Reader. That’s why Hall and others are
pushing schools to use early literacy screen
tools. Quick assessments (less than 15 minutes),
which can be given by a teacher or reading
specialist, should take place three times a year
starting in kindergarten through grade three,
says Hall. Benchmarks for reading
accomplishments have been published by the
National Academy of Sciences in a report about
preventing reading difficulties in young
children.
Early literacy screening tools (an
example of which can be found at www.getreadytoread.org) don’t meet resistance
when introduced to teachers, but they are
somewhat new and the word is still getting
out.
“It’s a very powerful predictor if
a kid is going to read well later,” says Hall.
“There is no reason why every teacher in the
U.S. shouldn’t be using this tool.” The No Child
Left Behind Act, the new federal education law,
includes language supporting the early literacy
screening tool.
Ongoing monitoring and assessment
should be a part of every good reading program.
If you ask a teacher if they monitor and keep
records of a child’s reading progress, they will
likely say yes. The better question, says
McCardle, is: “Do you have the tools you need to
really monitor kids? Are you doing periodic
assessments of each child, and how often do you
reassess and think about reorganizing which
reading group they are in?”
While we want kids reading by age
nine, the vigilance shouldn’t end there. “The
job is not done by the fourth grade,” says
McCardle. “We want to keep teaching reading
through middle school and high school.” Later
on, the emphasis is on building comprehension
skills.
Parents need to work with schools
to get best practices put into place. Sometimes
parents are reluctant to confront the school
about issues of curriculum and assessment. “Even
though we as parents feel that we are crossing
over the line, when it comes to reading that
early time counts. You don’t have a choice, you
have to stay involved.” says Hall.
To ensure your child is
getting the best reading instruction in school,
parents need to know – and be able to articulate
– what constitutes a quality reading program.
Here are some highlights from a parent guide
based on the research of the National Reading
Panel.
If your child is just beginning to learn to
read at school, you should see
teachers:
•Teaching the sounds of
language. •Teaching the letters of the
alphabet •Helping children learn and use new
words. •Reading with children every day using
expression. •At home you can help by reading
books with rhymes and playing word
games. •Help children separate sounds of
words and point out letters wherever you see
them. •If your child is just beginning to
read, at school you should see
teachers: •Teaching phonics (how sounds and
letters are related). •Having children
practice letter-sound relationships. •Helping
children write letter-sound relationships they
know by using them in words and
sentences. •Asking children questions to show
them how to think about the meaning of what they
are reading •At home you can help by pointing
out letter-sound relationships on labels,
newspapers and signs, and listening to your
child read and encouraging them. •If your
child is reading, at school you should see
teachers: •Continuing to teach letter-sound
relationships for children who need more
practice. •Teaching the meaning of
words. •Teaching students to use dictionaries
and how to get clues about a word from the rest
of the sentence. •Helping children understand
what they are reading.
At home you can help by rereading familiar
books to build confidence, increase accuracy by
correcting your child as he reads aloud, and
discuss and ask questions about stories (i.e.:
Who are the main characters? What did you
learn?) to improve comprehension.
Ten tips to help your child learn to love
reading.
Laura Backes, author of
Best Books for Kids Who Think They Hate to Read
(2001 Random House), offers some strategies to
help get your children excited about
reading.
1. Play it cool. Don’t nag or beg your child
to spend time reading. Instead, show how reading
is an enjoyable part of everyday life. Share
information as you read the newspaper. Rope your
child into reading during routine activities.
2. Know your child. No matter how broad or
obscure, your child’s passions can be found in a
book or magazine. Does your son fancy Buzz
Lightyear from the Toy Story movie? Get the
book. While you’re at it, pick out a few other
books about astronauts and space travel.
3. Let your child lead. Try to allow your
child as much freedom as possible. Don’t judge
your child’s personal interests. It gives
children a sense of power when they pursue a
subject and become experts on a topic.
4. Don’t give up lap time. Keep read-aloud
time in your routine even once kids can read
independently. Many children in fourth and fifth
grade still love being read to. This helps them
associate reading with pleasant, shared family
time.
5. Discuss books with your child. This may
smack of testing or homework, so use this tip
with caution. However, children love giving
their opinions on books. Ask your child about
parts of the story he did or didn’t like.
Discussing books you’ve read together show your
child that you respect his interests and
opinions.
6. Don’t push your child to “read up.” Don’t
pass up fun books for kids. Reading in itself in
an educational activity. If your child finds
books interesting instead of overwhelming,
she’ll want more.
7. Expose your child to a broad range of
experiences. The more life experiences a child
has - from going to a museum to baking cookies –
the more likely he’ll discover passions and
interests that connect with books.
8. Connect reading with other activities.
Reading books can be a springboard for
activities. Read a book about ladybugs and then
take a magnifying glass out to the backyard and
find some live specimens.
9. Promote your child’s oral language. Kids
need to develop their spoken language skills to
be good readers. Talk your kids and ask lots of
open-ended questions.
10. Give your child time to read. It’s easy
to turn a well-rounded child into an overbooked
one. It’s during those quiet, unscheduled hours
that kids have the chance to think, daydream and
read.
Parents with
children in small schools are significantly
happier with their children's education than are
parents with kids in large schools, according to
a recent Public Agenda
report.
But while evidence favors small
schools, small school parents normally associate
success not with school size, but class
size.
Talk to parents at virtually any
school where classes are larger than 20, and
you’ll most likely hear a constant refrain of
“if only we had smaller classes.” Indeed,
parents and school officials often link a
teacher’s success to how large or small a class
is. But the evidence just doesn’t
hold.
Intuitively, class-size reduction
makes sense; fewer students per teacher should
mean more attention per child. It’s certainly
true that smaller classes can have benefits for
teachers in terms of workload. It’s also the
case that a large class with one or more
disruptive students may impede a teacher’s
ability to serve all children. The research
about what makes an effective course of
instruction, however, rarely points to class
size.
Then why the public demand for smaller
classes? Because an experiment with class size
in a Tennessee produced good results for
children, especially minorities. California
tried a new initiative to reduce its average
class size from 28 to 20 students. But the
effort in that state actually failed to yield
results in achievement, leading many to question
the $8 billion that was spent. Few policymakers
there, however, will actually concede
that.
Researchers at Harvard University and
the University of Rochester have also confirmed
that simply reducing classes does not guarantee
improved achievement. A look at international
comparisons is also
telling.
In the recent Third International
Math and Science Study (TIMSS), Eighth grade
students in Singapore, Korea, Chinese Taipei,
Japan and Hong Kong had the highest scores. They
also have large classes, with 10 to 20 more
students than the U.S. average. On a national
level, between 1960 and 1995 the pupil-teacher
ratio fell by roughly one-third. In that same
time SAT scores declined and performance on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) has been
stagnant.
So what’s a parent to
do?
There is a
strategy that offers hope, and it does involve
reduction – not classes, but school-size
reduction. “The research is pretty clear on this
point: Smaller schools help promote learning,"
says Andrew Rotherham of the Progressive Policy
Institute. The University of Minnesota's Center
for School Change found that "small schools are
safer and, in general, students in small schools
learn more." Similarly, smaller schools produce
a greater feeling of student "connectedness,"
leading to reduced risks of violence, substance
abuse, suicide and pregnancy, as reported by Dr.
Robert Blum in the National Longitudinal Study
of Adolescent
Health.
So why is class-size-reduction the
reform of choice, even for parents whose
children are thriving in small schools? It is
mainly a function of politics. Teachers unions
like class-size reduction because it requires
that more teachers be hired, expanding union
rolls. It also promises to lighten workloads --
fewer students per teacher means fewer papers to
grade and students to track. Politicians, in
many cases, want the support of unions and have
found that this issue polls well so they have
become proponents of class-size
reduction.
The key to replacing the class-size
myth with small school reality, it appears, does
not lie with policy makers. It lies with
parents, who must persuade politicians to
support small schools and abandon politically
expedient but, educationally worthless,
class-size-reduction programs. After all,
politicians respond to whoever has the votes,
and parents represent a very large voting block.
Overcoming the effect of years of class size
myth perpetuation will require significant
effort. Once parents fully embrace the need for
smaller schools, however, policy makers will
follow.
www.nationalreadingpanel.org Here, you will find much of the
findings of the National Reading Panel in their
entirety or in easy-to-read documents. The
parent guide is called “Put Reading First,
Helping Your Child Learn to Read” and is geared
for preschool through grade three. The teacher
guide is called, “Put Reading First: The
Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children
to Read.” Or call 1-800-228-8813.
www.nifl.gov National
Institute for Literacy administers The
Partnership for Reading and other programs that
support the development of high quality state,
regional, and national literacy services.
www.nichd.nih.gov National
Institute of Child Health and Human
Development One of the three partners in The
Partnership for Reading, the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
conducts research and administers a variety of
programs.
http://dibels.uoregon.edu/index.php The
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy
Skills (DIBELS) are a set of standardized,
individually administered measures of early
literacy development. They are designed to be
short (one minute) fluency measures used to
regularly monitor the development of pre-reading
and early reading skills. At this site you can
download the assessments free.
www.publicagenda.org Public
Agenda provides the report “Sizing Things Up:
What Parents, Teachers, and Students Think About
Large and Small High
Schools.”
A child’s love of
language starts in the home. Playing rhyming
games, talking at the dinner table, and reading
together are all critical ways in which parents
nurture reading skills. Once your child enters
school, your role doesn’t end – it merely
changes. To make sure children become strong
readers, parents need to coach, monitor and
advocate for quality reading instruction. 
To ensure your child is
getting the best reading instruction in school,
parents need to know – and be able to articulate
– what constitutes a quality reading program.
Here are some highlights from a parent guide
based on the research of the National Reading
Panel.