Reading is the most important skill children can learn and provides a lifetime of benefits. But most children do not become proficient or lifelong readers. In Let Them Have Books, author Gaby Chapman offers a formula for delivering the gift of avid reading to every child.

Using research and her experience as a teacher, Chapman presents a detailed discussion of the reading habits of children. She covers why children should read, why they don’t, and what we can do to ensure that all children become enthusiastic readers.

Let Them Have Books outlines a new model for reading education. This model recognizes that the process of learning to read begins at birth and that different brains learn to read in different ways. This reading education centers on creating a dynamic reading culture in schools, one that encourages students to choose the books they read and provides ample time in school to read them.

About the Author: Gaby Chapman learned to question education norms from her uncle, acclaimed educator John Holt. As school board president in the 1970s, she oversaw construction of a school and developed one of California’s first charter schools. She retired from teaching in 2009 and lives in Northern California with her husband.

Let Them Have Books

A Formula for Universal Reading ProficiencyBy Gaby Chapman

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Gaby Chapman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-5777-0

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................xiPreface......................................................................................xiiiPart One: Why Kids Should Read...............................................................1Chapter 1: Kids who read get a great deal from books.........................................3Chapter 2: Kids who read do well in school...................................................10Chapter 3: Kids who read become adults who read..............................................17Part Two: Why Kids Don't Read................................................................25Chapter 4: Some kids do not get the early literacy experience they need......................27Chapter 5: For some kids, learning to read is a struggle.....................................35Chapter 6: In school, many kids learn to hate to read........................................44Part Three: What Kids Need to Become Readers.................................................61Chapter 7: Kids need a full preliteracy experience...........................................63Chapter 8: Dyslexic kids need early recognition and targeted instruction.....................71Chapter 9: Kids need schools that foster a reading culture...................................80Appendix A: Books and Authors Mentioned......................................................93Appendix B: Further Resources Mentioned......................................................99Bibliography.................................................................................101Index........................................................................................111

Chapter One

Kids Who Read Get a Great Deal from Books

An eight-year-old sits in a chair with her knees drawn up, nearing the end of The Sisters Grim, Book 2. She lifts her eyes from the page for a moment to gaze out her aunt's living room window. She is not looking out the window because she hears the joyful cries of the other children playing in the pool. Those eyes that gaze out the window are thinking eyes. With just a few pages left in her book, she has reached the resolution of the plot, and she is resolving in her own mind the sense of it.

Olivia was swimming earlier, playing a diving game, competing to see who could retrieve the most plastic rings that had been dropped along the bottom of the pool. At various moments, amid the shrieks and the splashing and the glorious summer sun, the memory of where she last left the story drifted into her conscious mind. The distinct characters with their burdens, their motivations, and their interactions weighed in and felt familiar. At some point, the excitement of the game ebbed just enough, and the desire to know what was going to happen next drew her back inside to finish her book.

Olivia will finish this book with a taste for more. When she goes home, her mother will have The Sisters Grim, Book 3 waiting for her. Olivia chooses the books she reads either from the library or from selections her mother makes available to her. She has already learned how to get the feel of a book by looking at the cover, reading the beginning, thumbing through the pages, and subconsciously matching up her own distinct intellectual quest with what she sees.

All summer, Olivia will immerse herself in reading. At the age when the hunger to know everything is at its freshest and most vibrant, she will find real treasure in the pages of books. At the age when reading a book at any time of the day, anywhere, and for any length of time triggers absolutely no guilt, Olivia will breeze through tens of thousands of pages, all the while increasing her understanding of the world and of herself and gaining facility with language. A passion for reading found here in the guiltless days of youth will never leave and will return in many forms and for many reasons throughout this child's life journey.

Reading is fun for Olivia, as it is for many children and adults. Part of the fun comes from the pleasure of experiencing and gratifying an innate yearning to find out what is going to happen next. A good story ratchets up the yearning and then delivers the pleasure of resolution. Another part comes from the fulfillment of another strong and innate yearning: the desire to know more about our world.

Reading hasn't always been fun for Olivia. At the beginning of the first grade, she asked me when I thought most kids learned to read. With tears in her eyes, she told me she didn't think she would be able to learn. Before she went to school, Olivia had loved books. There was no activity she would not drop, given the opportunity to have a book read to her. Amazed for many years at their young daughter's natural intelligence, Olivia's parents expected she would have no trouble learning to read, and Olivia eagerly anticipated going to school, where she knew she would learn to read. Initially confident in her own intelligence, she soon began to sense there was something she did not have, something that was keeping her from being able to learn. She came home one day late in the school year and told her surprised mother that she and two boys in her class were being pulled out of class to get extra help in reading.

After getting vague answers to their questions from the school, Olivia's parents took the matter into their own hands and immediately had Olivia privately tested. When the tests revealed a high intelligence paired with a weakness in several, but not all, of the indicators of a neurobiological reading difficulty, they made appointments for remediation. By the time she entered second grade, Olivia was finishing up visual exercises and a series of computer games designed to strengthen her processing speed (ability to rapidly integrate and memorize symbols and words) and associative memory (ability to store and retrieve newly learned information in the process of thinking).

The trauma of Olivia's first year with reading lingered into her second year. She read short grade-level books easily, but they did not inspire her. She did gain confidence in her own ability to read, and her parents continued to read to her. In the spring, her mother began reading aloud from Into the Wild, the first book of the Warriors Saga, by Erin Hunter. After a couple of chapters, Olivia took the book to bed with her. She had hopped aboard the reading train.

Summer came and Olivia, then age eight, read at every opportunity. As all good readers do, Olivia read to learn about how others think and feel and handle an infinite range of emotions and situations. She read to learn about the wider world, its present, its past, and its potential future. She read to know more about herself—what moved her, what she cared about, what seemed right to her, and what seemed wrong. She read to enjoy the transport too—the sense of being carried away to another, temporary reality and of living vicariously. As a reader, she also gained a strong sense of independence as the steward of her own intellectual discovery, capable of drawing on a reserve of the experiences of others to make choices and meet challenges.

School started again, and Olivia continued to read for fun. By midyear, her teacher no longer required her to bring in the signed letter from her parents each week confirming that she was reading on her own. As teachers always do, he recognized a reader in Olivia. All the work pertaining to language was easy for Olivia; her report card showed perfect scores in writing, reading comprehension, grammar, and sentence composition. She did well in her other subjects also; she had regained her confidence in her own intelligence and had fallen headlong in love with knowledge.

By the end of her third-grade year, Olivia had read approximately thirty thousand pages in the year since she had read the first volume of the Warriors Saga. She had read the other seventeen volumes of the Warriors Saga, all thirteen volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events, ten of the Boxcar Children books, ten of the Geronimo Stilton books, three Molly Moon books, five from the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, six sets of the American Girl series, seven volumes of The Sister's Grim series, three volumes of Peter and the Starcatchers, eight volumes of Vet Volunteers, and two of The Mysterious Benedict Society. (See Appendix A for a full list of all books and authors mentioned in this book.) She had also read single volumes by Gennifer Choldenko, Kate DiCamillo, Gail Carson Levine, George Martin, Cornelia Funke, Andrew Clements, Scott O'Dell, Dan Gutman, Marion Dane Bauer, Shannon Hale, and Jeanne DuPrau and many more short books read in a single sitting.

Olivia entered fourth grade the following year. This is the year when schools no longer focus on teaching kids how to read and begin to focus on teaching them how to get something out of their reading. Reading moves from being a learned skill that allows the reader to have fun to being a skill that enables the reader to perform work. As Anna, a student in my sixth-grade class, put it, "I was beginning to think of reading as an assignment—something you must do, or else."

Like Olivia, Anna had loved being read to as a toddler in Mexico. She had no trouble learning to read, and by the end of kindergarten, she had already "cracked the code" and was reading on her own in Spanish. The next year, her family moved to the United States. Anna was fortunate to enroll in a school that had one bilingual first-grade class. She continued to read in Spanish. As she began to learn to speak English, it was easy for her to transfer her ability to read in Spanish to reading in English. One day, her teacher recommended she read with the English group. As Anna remembers it, "One day, we got in our groups and read a book about a sheep, and I was the first person to finish. The other kids were having a lot of trouble, and they only spoke English."

Anna loved school and consistently brought home top grades. Her mother read to and with her often. Her parents always made sure she had books to read. Although her interest in reading declined in the fourth and fifth grades, she immediately thrived in my sixth-grade classroom, where I encouraged plenty of unassigned, personal-choice reading. By seventh grade, in a class filled with enthusiastic readers, Anna was especially enthusiastic. In the reading record log where my students listed and rated the books they read, she was the only one who rated every single one of the forty-seven books she read during her seventh-grade year at a "10."

For Anna, choosing the books she read gave her more than a pastime she enjoyed and more than confidence in her ability to turn in quality schoolwork. Anna also chose books that gave her confidence in her ability to navigate the approaching teen years—books by authors like Alex Finn, Jane Yolen, Alyson Noel, Ellen Hopkins, Lauren Myracle, Janette Rallison, Cassandra Clare, E. Lockhart, Rick Riordan, Jay Asher, and Laurie Halse Anderson. Reading over twenty thousand pages that year, she also became the class expert on the vampire genre; she read all volumes of the Blue Blood series, the House of Night series, the Morganville Vampire series, the Night World series, the Secret Circle series, the Vampire Academy series, and the Twilight series.

Both Olivia and Anna read to gain understanding and information, and the joy came from satisfying that quest. For some kids, and especially for preteens and teens, the joy can also come from finding solace in books. Clarinda, a student in my seventh-grade class, could not get along with her mother, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't be accepted by the most popular girls in school. Her dad worried that she was suicidal. In my class she discovered reading. Later in the year, she wrote that the main reason she left watching reality TV and came to "this crazy, different, and imaginative world of books" was stress. Stress brought depression, but books brought her out of it.

Finding books helped Erika also. At fifteen, Erika had only bad experiences with books and relentless difficulty at home. She had learned to read by third grade but had never read any books. In middle school her class was assigned to read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. She looked at the front and back covers and decided not to even bother. Her grades were consistently low, and in parent-teacher conferences her parents always heard how poor her reading and writing skills were.

When Erika enrolled in my ninth-grade class, she tried to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She did minimal schoolwork, turning in only enough work to keep her grade from falling and triggering another dreaded parent-teacher conference. She coped with silent-reading time by pretending to read. I gave her new books to try every now and then, but I did not pressure her. By the end of that year, she had begun to respect her classmates' enthusiasm for reading, and some of her distaste for books had begun to thin.

In tenth grade, one of Erika's classmates encouraged her to read a book from the Bluford series, a collection of fifteen high-interest young-adult novels published by Townsend Press. Each two-hundred- page book focuses on the lives of a high school student and his or her family. In each one, complex topics relevant to the lives of today's students are addressed: family, friendship, trust, isolation, violence, and peer pressure. Erika read all fifteen of the books in the Bluford series, three thousand pages, an impressive start for someone who had never read a book. When she finished the Bluford series, she kept on reading, choosing books by Ellen Hopkins, April Henry, and Patrick Jones. By the end of that year, Erika wrote this about reading:

Now in tenth grade, my English teacher, Gaby, has given me so many good and interesting books. Most are about little children and young adults dealing with poverty and abuse. I'm more able to read a book if I'm able to relate to it in some way or other. Some of the books Gaby has given me are Someone to Love Me, Search for Safety, The Fallen, and The Gun. Let me tell you, if you understand what these kids are going through and how they feel, you will actually start crying!

If I have learned anything from these books, it is that there is a way to deal with things without getting yourself in serious trouble. When you find a book that you are very much interested in, it takes you into this place of comfort and security—somewhere that you know is your true home.

It's why I love reading; it lets me know that I'm not the only one that goes through all this stuff. It gives me these wonderful feelings that I'm not even able to describe.

Life had not been easy for Erika; she could not feel comfortable in her own home. In books, she found solace and guidance. She began to find turning in schoolwork was not really such a chore. She learned she actually enjoyed writing and could write well. Her grades rose.

"Books are something I must have," wrote Charlie, another preteen who found a much needed friend in books. He discovered the joy of reading for the first time in my sixth-grade classroom. That year he read all fifty of K. A. Applegate's Animorph series, twelve of Piers Anthony's fantasy novels, all seven of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, and twelve of R. L. Stine's books. I did not have a book budget that year, my first year, but when Charlie was ready for a new book, I bought it for him. I felt as if I were throwing him a lifeline, and no way could I let that line drop.

While Charlie chose books that helped him escape a difficult daily life, others may choose books that help them think about their world or, as Rena put it, "books that have mental struggling." While some books, such as the Warrior Saga by Erin Hunter and the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, are enjoyed by both genders, boys generally pick entirely different books to read than girls do. Often, boys tell me they like a book that "feels like a movie in my head." (Older boys seem to like it if that movie is frightening.) Other boys seek books that will bring them into "deeper thought, as if a door is opening," as Phil put it.

Kids who choose the books they read don't all choose the same books because they are all looking for books tailored exactly to who they are as unique individuals. Their reading lists read like road maps of their distinctive personalities.

Kids who choose the books they read find what they are looking for. By doing so, they find a friend for life.

Chapter Two

Kids Who Read Do Well in School

Other middle school teachers complain to me that Ian is always trying to read his book in their classes. They say they think he has trouble with memory and organization. When they ask him if he has completed his homework, he looks bewildered and then remembers only after the teacher reminds him what it was he was supposed to do. After extensive rummaging, he finds his homework deep in his backpack.

I don't think Ian has a problem with memory and organization; I think he sees his schoolwork as an intruder on his time for reading and pushes schoolwork way down the list of what he wants to think about. He politely completes his work only if someone stands over him. The quality of the work he does turn in is minimal but correct. I have stopped requiring him to do his vocabulary homework since he always scores a 100 percent on all the tests. His grammar quizzes are also often perfect, even though his eyes are mostly fastened on a book inside his desk while I am teaching. When he does the sentence composition work, he never has any trouble understanding what he needs to do, and he does it well. His writing is underdeveloped for his seventh-grade level because he spares so little time for his writing assignments. I am not worried about this because I have had students like Ian in my middle school classes before.

Ian learned to read in second grade and thought nothing of it until he found a book he liked—Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins. Like Olivia when she found The Warrior Saga, Ian had found something he would never stop loving. In sixth grade, he enrolled in our school and was in my classroom. He had attended two previous schools without losing any of his passion for reading. His mother expressed her gratitude that in my classroom he would have access to all the books he wanted because it was saving her so much money.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Let Them Have Booksby Gaby Chapman Copyright © 2010 by Gaby Chapman. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.