The TV Experiment

This post is a confession.

We here at Casa Bookivore do not, in fact, sit around and read to each other all day long. And lately, the lure of the Electronic Babysitter has been strong, so there's been way too much TV watching than is good for young brains (old ones either, come to that).

So just before Thanksgiving, we began the TV Experiment. We weren't going to do the whole binge-purge thing: an all-or-nothing approach didn't seem like a good way to teach our kids about moderation. Instead, we decided to be intentional with our TV watching. No more TV on as a kind of technicolor background noise, no more sliding unmonitored from program to program until we'd realize with a guilty start that the kids had been watching TV for 4 hours.

We started with breakfast. My littlest one likes to watch the PBS morning slate of shows -- about an hour and a half's worth -- while eating her oatmeal. Tuesday morning, we got up and just did. not. turn. on. the. TV.

No one really noticed, maybe because departures from routine are always kind of cool for a while. The older two even broke out a game of Stratego before school. Board games, cooperative play...things were looking very good.

Baby noticed on Wednesday that the TV still wasn't on for breakfast. Could we have it on please? No, was my gentle reply. Let's look at the new Your Big Backyard magazine instead. Your brother will help read it to you. And he did.

We have been doing this for 5 days now, and my children have done the following things: built an elaborate 3-room fort in the dining room, cleaned when I asked them to, painted together for a solid hour, read to the baby, made origami Yodas, helped set the table for Thanksgiving dinner, played card games and board games with each other, played with the dog, practiced their piano lessons and played the piano for fun, picked up their rooms, got out toys they haven't played with in months and played with them, made their beds, read lots of books, and generally spread peace and joy throughout the world.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

We have watched a bit of TV here and there: we watched Charlie Brown on Thanksgiving night, a couple football games, an hour of Sponge Bob. But every time we did, we made it an event and we turned the TV off when the show was over (or the timer went on Sponge Bob). It was all very intentional.

Not only have my children been more creative and cooperative, but I myself am calmer, maybe because I am not having to compete with the TV for their attention. The kids seem to be listening better, probably for the same reason. I like that we are in control of the TV instead of the other way around. We're going to keep things this way for the foreseeable future.

It's a good way to head into the holiday season, don't you think?

Sobering Statistics

Before kindergarten:

• More than 30% of low-income children have no familiarity with print -- they don't know which way up to hold a book, or where the story starts and ends, or that we read from left to right. 17% of middle-income kids and 8% of those with college-educated parents also lack this knowledge.


• About 60% of low-income kids don't know the alphabet. More than 30% of middle-income kids don't know it either. That's one in three for middle-income kids.


• Only a mere 6% of low-income and 18% of middle-income kids understand numerical sequence. (Stats compliments of Kappan Magazine, Nov. 2010)
  

What does this mean? It means that children don't all start at the same point when they begin kindergarten. And it means that a lot more kids are falling through the cracks than we used to think.

The good news is that we have the tools to fix all these problems right at home.

• Read to your child every day. 20 minutes is an absolute minimum. Aim for 30 or 40. Spread it out during the day, if possible. If your child is in daycare, ask how often the daycare provider reads to the kids. Talk about how we hold books, point out which side we start reading from, look for the beginning and the end of each book.


• Invest in or check out some alphabet books. Read them. Get or make some alphabet flash cards (use 3x5 index cards, write each letter on one card in clear, block form. Cut out magazine pictures of things that start with that letter, or draw a picture if you're artsy.) Sing the alphabet song -- here's a whole bunch of people singing the classic version, or watch this version on YouTube, or SuperWhy's version.


• I don't say this very often, but some TV shows do a nice job of reinforcing letter and number concepts. On PBS, Sesame Street, SuperWhy and Between the Lions would be my picks for the basics. Martha Speaks and Word Girl are good vocabulary builders. On Nick Jr., Dora the Explorer does a lot with counting, so that might be a good choice. The classic Blues Clues (the Steve years) also does a lot of counting and some letter recognition. Be intentional with TV and videos here: most kid's shows aren't really all that educational in nature.

• Look for counting books at the library or bookstore. Here are some titles to get you started. Count stuff. Count socks as you put them in drawers. Count your child's toes. Count plates as you set the table. Count the burgers in your fast food order. Count stoplights on the way home. Buy or make number flashcards just like the alphabet ones. Have your child put stickers on each card to represent the number shown.

• Some people disagree with this, but Bookivore is a firm believer in the importance of preschool. If your state offers universal preschool, take advantage of it. Participation in a preschool program offers tons of literacy benefits, as well as social benefits. If you don't have universal preschool, consider enrolling your child for at least one year in a private program. Even if you are a homeschooler, consider sending your child to a preschool program. Keep in mind that the focus of preschool is not academics -- it's learning through play and experience -- and some of that experience is hard to provide at home, at least not to the same scope and degree to which a good preschool can. Experiences are a huge part of cultural capital. I realize this is not a home-tool per se, but it is a big predictor of whether kids will begin kindergarten with gaps, so I would not be doing my job if if didn't mention it
  
  

Keep reading to your kids. Keep offering them whatever experiences you can. We're getting there.

Literacy Bags

Literacy bags go by different names: Book Bags, Story Bags, and Book Buddies are just a few. The basic idea behind them, though, is to provide story enrichment activities around a particular theme. They can be used in the home or as part of literacy centers in the classroom. In the home setting, they help you, the parent, show your child that reading is both desirable and fun.

Literacy bags work well in preschool and kindergarten settings, and even in up to 3rd grade if the activities are carefully selected. Above and below are some pictures of the contents of a literacy bag my 4 year old brought home from preschool.

The book was Down By the Bay, which is based on the Raffi song by the same name. The literacy bag contained 3 types of activities: a matching activity with rhyming words, a puzzle activity, and a second rhyming activity that went beyond the rhymes in the book. The picture above is the first rhyming activity -- matching a picture with another picture that rhymes. We had a picture of a pear and a bear, a bat and a hat, and so on.


Then we had a set of very simple puzzles -- just line drawings of animals from the story cut into pieces and laminated. The final activity, below, was to come up with some objects from around the house and then think of words that rhyme with them. The theme here was "things that rhyme."


Another bag that she brought home the following week was for the book The Gingerbread Boy. This one was even more simple -- just the book and a selection of felt pieces depicting characters or objects necessary to the story.

We used the pieces to retell the story, then we used them to sequence the events of the story -- first the Gingerbread Boy met the cow, then the horse, then the farmer, then the fox. First he sat on the fox's tail, then his back, then his head, then his nose...and we moved the gingerbread boy each time to the right position.

If you are a homeschooler, or a teacher, or a parent volunteer, Literacy Bags are something you can make yourself. You could even throw some together for vacation days and summer activities if, like me, you are desperate for stuff your kids can do when there's no school. Below are a couple of resources for creating your own bags. Neither are in print anymore, but they are readily available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble's used book sellers and from Better World Books.

Also, here's a link to a teachers' discussion board with some interesting ideas for literacy bags (also math and science bags, though that's out of the scope of this blog). Some of the discussion assumes training in teaching methods, but several entries are basic, easy-to-apply suggestions.

Literacy bags are wonderful tools to make stories come alive, to help kids think more deeply about what happened in the story, to practice retelling and sequencing, and to build those connections that increase their chances of success in school.

Sequencing

Sequencing is the ability to put events in order -- first, middle, last. Generally this is organized by how events must occur logically, or how they actually occurred in a story.

Sequencing is something kids often need help figuring out: what seems logical to an adult is by no means obvious to a child. It is especially important that kids learn to identify the parts of a story and place them in the order they happened. The ability to sequence is necessary to almost all types of writing and to many mathematical processes as well.

Fortunately, this is easy to teach and there are many, many books out there that lend themselves to this kind of activity very well.

Here's a very short list:

The Lady With the Alligator Purse, by Nadine Bernard Westcott

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (or a Shell, or a Bat, or any of the bazillion variations on this traditional tale), by Various

Good Night Gorilla, by Peggy Rathman

Rabbit's Pajama Party, by Stuart Murphy

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst

Manana, Iguana, by Ann Whitford Paul

The Tiny Seed/The Very Lonely Firefly/The Very Quiet Cricket, by Eric Carle

Really almost any book can be used to teach this skill, but when you're dealing with preschoolers it's best to keep things simple. Here's the activity in a nutshell: Read the book, talk about what happened first, what happened in the middle, what happened last or at the end. Boom -- done.

How come none of this looks like chicken nuggets?

For older children, recipes are a good way to practice sequencing. Have your reading child read a recipe as you both prepare it OR find a favorite dish and let your child write out the steps as you cook it. Any activity that has to occur in steps can be good practice for sequencing -- just talking through the steps.

It takes all of about 2 minutes to talk through a story and point out the order of events. Give this one a try next time you read to your little ones.

Creating a Culture of Reading

Part of helping kids learn to read is creating a culture of reading. Even though you read read read to them, if you, yourself, aren't much of a reader, chances are very good that your child will grow up to be someone who regards reading as something you do only when you have to.

This may seem very obvious, but the first step toward creating a culture of reading in your home is to have books. I know ---DUH. But do you have books for you? Do you have magazines you like to read? Do you ever turn off the TV at night and just read? Are there books on your nightstand or beside the bed? If your house has kid books and nothing else, eventually your kids may decide that reading isn't something grown ups do.

Do you have bookshelves full of lovely, color coordinated books? If not, call Nate Berkus and have him get you a set up like this one:

Pretty, no? But probably not used. If you pulled one out to read it, you'd mess up the arrangement. I will tell you a hard truth: people who aren't readers have cleaner houses than those of us who love books.

Get some shelves for your kids' books and then put them where the kids can reach them. Make books available whenever they want them. Make a rule that unless you're tying a tourniquet or landing the space shuttle you will drop what you're doing and read to your child when they ask you to at least once a day. Notice that I am not saying you have to do this all day long. The laundry, the cooking, these have to be done, but they're not so critical that they can't wait 10 minutes while you read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

Take your kids to the library or the used book store and make a big deal out of it -- act like you're going to Disneyland...or at least act like you're going to Starbucks. Anticipation is everything. Make sure you get some books for you, too. Take them to story time at your library, or at your local Barnes and Noble. Don't take them to story time at Pottery Barn Kids. Totally wrong message.

Let them catch you reading. Read a magazine while you drink coffee in the morning. Or read while you dry your hair. Turn off the TV and read in the evening (say whaaaaa?). Read a book in the afternoon just before they come home from school so they walk in and catch you reading. I often read when I'm waiting to pick up my youngest from preschool. I read in doctors' offices, I read in the bathtub, I read before bed. My kids know I read.

Pretend you're in a book club with your kids. Read the same books and talk about what you're reading. Talk about what you liked or didn't, what surprised you, what you predicted. Recommend books to each other -- kids love to do this and they love it even more when you take their suggestions. My kids are always tickled pink when they see me reading a book they recommended to me.

Make them read for information. This is something you can do when they get fairly competent: have them read recipes to you, or directions to a specific location or for a specific task, or the announcements from the church bulletin, or junk mail that looks interesting.

All these things underscore the message that reading is important in your house. If you can also convey that it's enjoyable, even desirable, you will keep your child pointed in the right direction.

20 Minutes Worth of Ideas

Remember on Monday when I said it's tough sometimes to carve out those 20 minutes for reading practice?

Well, sometimes it's also hard to carve out 20 minutes for blogging. I certainly meant to post these ideas yesterday, but Life, as they say, intervened.

So here they are, a day late but no less valuable. Twenty minutes of reading can be very intimidating for a child, so the purpose here is to mix things up a bit so they don't feel any overwhelming sense of pressure. Let me clarify that these are for kids who are school age -- 1st, 2nd, even 3rd grade. Possibly Kindergarten if your child is really smokin' hot in the reading department.


1. Partner read. Mom or Dad reads a paragraph, then the child reads a paragraph. Alternate for several minutes or for the whole time. My son often forgets where he's supposed to stop and will sometimes keep reading to the end of the page (which is a much more obvious break than a paragraph when you're 7). For short books or books with a little text on each page, you could alternate pages.

2. Popcorn read. The child begins reading and then stops at some random point. When s/he stops, s/he says "Mom, go!" and the parent picks up at that point and reads for awhile. Then the parent stops at a random point and says "Go!" to the child, and so on. This really forces the child (and the parent) to follow along as the other one is reading.

3. Stop and Go. This is for when your child is maxed out on reading aloud. The parent does all the reading, but stops at random points in the text. The child must then point to where the parent stopped.

4. Whisper read. Either the parent, or the child, or both, read the text in a whisper. Kids usually love this one because it's different -- like making pancakes in the shape of a mouse. They're still pancakes but they seem exotically different. The kids are still reading, but whispering brings it a nice sense of novelty.

5. Shout it out. If you can stand the noise, you could read the text as loudly as possible. Obviously not good right before bedtime.

6. Out Loud/In Loud. Alternate silent and out-loud reading. This is a good one as their reading skills improve. The child reads a page or a paragraph to him/herself and then says "done." The parent picks up the reading from that point out loud. Have the child alternate silent and out-loud reading -- in other words, the child shouldn't be only reading silently.

7. Mixer. Combine any or all of the above ideas. Popcorn read for a bit, then alternate paragraphs, then whisper for a while, then have the child read silently, etc.

There's no magic formula that's going to work -- it's just practice. And changing things up a bit to keep your child interested. And then more practice.

But it does work, if you put in the time.

20 Minutes a Day...

That's the minimum recommended length of time a parent should read to a child, or a child should read to a parent EACH DAY to achieve reading competence and fluency. For a very young child, say under 5, that's about 4-5 books before bed. For an older child, it's usually a straight measure of time.

Twenty minutes: it doesn't seem like so much.

However, we all know that sometimes it IS hard to carve 20 minutes of dedicated reading time out of our busy schedules. Especially if you have multiple children. And especially if your kids are in activities. And especially if you like them to go to bed before you do (can I get an amen?)

When you take out the actual school day (about 7.5 hours if your kids ride a bus; longer if they go to before/after care) then remove the time needed for activities -- an hour for soccer practice, a 1/2 hour for piano or guitar, 30-90 minutes for dance or gymnastics, 2 hours for church activities; and then take out the 30-60 minutes of driving time and the 30-60 minutes for eating, brushing teeth, getting that last drink of water, etc.; and the 9-10 hours (please God) that they're actually sleeping, you're not left with a whole heck of a lot. About 2-3 hours, in little chunks throughout the day.


One of those chunks has to be devoted to reading.

And not because Bookivore says so, because it just IS so.


And yes, you have to make room for it even if the best time to do it is while you're making dinner or right about when you want to put your own feet up and just be for a little while, or you've just gotten home from work and all you can think about is what the score might be in the game you were listening to on sports radio on the way home, or when you've spent most of the day running people to and from here and there and THEY don't want to read to YOU and you have to make them although secretly you'd rather just go take a long hot bath but the teacher says they have to read to you.



Oh baby, Bookivore feels your pain.

And yes, teachers understand that we have busy lives. They have busy lives, too. But it still has to be done. Not because they're mean or unfeeling, but because it's best for your child. If you have a first or second grader, even a third grader, it's critical to their development as readers.

So suck it up, baby.

You can do this.

Wednesday I'm going to post a few ideas for those 20 minutes to help pass the time as constructively as possible.

Planning for Success: A Good Breakfast

Image courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post

Sometimes, things interfere with a child's ability to learn. One thing that has a powerful impact is hunger. Hungry children don't learn as well as children who are well-fed because their brains become consumed with the need to eat. Instead of focusing on what happens when you encounter silent e, they are thinking, "What can I eat? When can I eat? How can I get my stomach to stop hurting RIGHT NOW?" Children who are persistently hungry tend to perform worse on standardized tests (Tufts University Center on Hunger Poverty and Nutrition Policy). One study that examined hungry kindergarteners found that hunger was directly linked to a drop in math scores. Probably reading, too, but they didn't look at that (Food Insecurity and Hunger in the Kindergarten Classroom: Its Effect on Learning and Growth, Winicki and Jemison, 1999).



This may seem like a no-brainer, but it really is important for kids to have a good, healthy breakfast before they go to school, and I would submit that they need a mid-morning snack if their lunch period is more than 3.5 hours from when they ate breakfast. Unfortunately, some schools seem unable to grasp this idea and act like snacks are an unforgivable inconvenience. This is particularly true as you move into the higher grades -- 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th -- but not when you get to junior high or high school -- children that age can usually eat during their passing time between classes without anyone going into a tizzy over contraband food. It's bizarre to me that adults will wander an elementary building with a cup of coffee and a donut or bagel, seldom going more than 2 hours without eating, yet deny kids the same opportunity.

Image courtesy of The Daily Green

So, what can parents do to maximize their children's chance of success in the classroom?

1. Find something healthy (read: balanced) for them to eat at breakfast. If you need some ideas, try The Daily Green and Family Fun for some recipes. Sweet rolls are yummy, but not the best choice to start the day. Ditto for that bowl of Cocoa Puffs.



2. Lobby for snacks in the classroom if your child has to wait more than 3.5 hours between breakfast and lunch. Be respectful, but be firm. Sometimes, you can even make it a medical issue. One of my children gets migraines, which are occasionally triggered by hunger. She is now able to go to the nurse's office and have a snack at 11 o'clock, a full 1.5 hours before her lunch (her breakfast-to-lunch waiting period is 5 hours -- waaaaay too long). Her classmates, however, are out of luck.

Image courtesy of Reader's Digest.com. Go there for the recipe -- yummy!

3. Pack a snack with some substance. This is not the time for fruit snacks and YoGos (these are just candy with a good marketing rep, folks). Pack cheese sticks, peanut butter on crackers (check your school's peanut policy first -- a lot of schools are peanut-free because of allergy issues), protein bars, a bagel with cream cheese, a bag of granola... something that will hold your child until lunch.

4. Pack a good lunch and/or monitor their selections for school lunch. Sometimes the problem is on the other end of the day -- your child has an early lunch and then has a long wait until he arrives home. Be sure to pack lunches high in protein and complex carbohydrates which take the body more time to digest. It's okay to pack treats, but if your kids are like mine, they eat the treat first and may actually ignore their sandwich or cheese or whatever healthy stuff is in there to keep them going. If you pack a treat, make it small. Here are some fun sites for lunch ideas: Family Fun, Raising a Healthy Family, What's for Lunch at Our House (Bento Boxes -- so cool, but maybe a little intimidating), a more down-to-earth take on Bentos at Just a Girl, and lunches for kids with severe food allergies at To The Moon and Back.

Food. It's important. Make sure your kids are getting what they need when they need it.

Purchasing Cultural Capital

Cultural capital, you will remember, is the bank of experience kids bring to the table when they go to school, and learn to read and write and compute sums, and generally navigate life. The more experiences kids have, the more "money" in their "banks." Research shows that the more actual money in the parents' bank accounts, the more experiences they can afford to purchase for their children -- things like zoo trips, museums, sports experiences, travel, computer usage, etc.



Trouble is, some of us want to give our kids these things but are living on one income. How, then, do we give our kids experiences?

Bookivore and her husband realized a while ago that birthdays and Christmas were becoming Toy Explosion Events: it was like Toys R Us threw up in our house. We were swamped with toys, drowning in toys, caught in giant sinkholes of toys from which there was no escape.

One too many Polly Pockets -- the Horror!

So Bookivore and Mr. Bookivore (who actually prefers to be known as Big Truck) started asking grandparents and aunts and uncles to start giving the kids experiences rather than stuff.

I won't lie to you: there was consternation, especially among the grandparents, for whom the role of fairy godmother was very very pleasant. However, we were as firm as we could be without actually bonking anyone on the head and shouting "Get OVER it!" And some very nice things began to happen.

My sister-in-law quit giving gifts entirely in favor of a Day of Fun: the birthday child goes to their home for the day and chooses any activity he or she wants: ice skating, zoo, pool, roller skating, ceramics decorating shop, tennis, golf...whatever. The child also chooses a lunch destination and a dinner destination (always fast food), and can add in activities like Wii, cookie making and decorating, dress up or art projects of some sort. And here's the super-coolio part: she then makes a DVD of the day using some magically awesome program on her computer that transitions photos, blends in video, and sets it all to music. Then the birthday kid can re-live the day over and over. Fabulous.

One set of grandparents has given mini-memberships to a rock-climbing facility near our house for the last 2 years. That has the added bonuses of being fun and good exercise. They also give magazine subscriptions that we would not ordinarily be able to afford. Another aunt makes about half her gifts books, which of course, Bookivore thinks is totally awesome. We still have one hold- out that can't let go of giving toys, but the balance between experiences and stuff has shifted in a good way.

Unfortunately, the starting line for kids isn't always the same, but we can help our kids stay in the game by making some changes that allow them to have more experiences, rather than just more toys to store, break, and give to Goodwill.

Sustained Silent Reading

Bookivore has talked ad nauseum about the benefits of reading to your children. If you can't get enough of my harping, you can re-read it here, here and here.

But today I want to tell you about the natural partner of reading aloud, Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and how it can help your children improve both their attitudes about reading and their reading ability.

SSR is a period of time between 10 and 30 minutes in which a child reads recreationally. There is no limitation placed on what he or she chooses to read, other than that it should be interesting to the child. If they want to read the newspaper, great. Magazine? Okay. Serialized Pokemon novels? Knock yourself out. Generally, of course, they're going to be reading books, and that's mainly what should be available, but other forms of text are fine. The only "rule" is that they do nothing but read to themselves for a sustained period (which at its minimum, isn't all that long).

What will SSR do for your kids? In a study on kids who were reading 2 years behind grade level, the children were divided into 2 groups: one group spent 10 weeks doing SSR, the other group spent 10 weeks using a basal reader (a book used to teach reading and reading skills). In other words, one group was being "taught" reading, while the other group was just reading. The result of the study was that the SSR group scored significantly higher in measures of reading and attitudes toward reading than the basal reader group (Holt and O'Tuel, 1988).

Similarly, The Condition of Education, 1997 reported that 9, 13, and 17-year old students who reported reading for fun at least once a week had higher average reading proficiency scores than those who reported never or hardly ever reading for fun.

The more you read, the better you get at it. Amazing!

So in the midst of your busy summer, grab a stack of books, set aside a 10 -30 minute period and tell your kids they're going to spend it reading. Let them read whatever they want. Don't grill them on what they read afterward. Aim to do it 3 times a week. Bookivore humbly suggests you drop what you're doing and join in. There's nothing more powerful than the very-present model of a parent reading for fun right along with the kids.

A Reader is Born -- I mean Made

I brought this book home from the library, thinking my son might be interested in it as a read-aloud for bedtimes. After much cajoling, he let me read the first chapter, just to see if it would be any good.

Boring, Mom. No dice.

However, after lights-out, my husband caught him in his closet, reading it by flashlight. Normally, we'd just consider this a highly advanced attempt at staying up later, but he went on and on about how good it was, how funny, how he just wanted to read it a little bit longer, just another minute, just ONE MORE .... come ON!

not my kid, but cute, eh?

Next morning he got up early and finished it.

For months I've been waiting for a "breakthrough" for him -- that shift between the labor of decoding text and the joy of reading a story. It has been a slow process. Decoding is so much more work for him than it was for his older sister. He skips words, he skips whole lines, he's so focused on spelling out each word, he sometimes loses the thread of the story. He has consistently been at least 5 months behind where his sister was at the same age.

Now, I want to tell you that it would have been easier for Bookivore to just say, "Well, I guess he's not going to be much of a reader" and let it slide. Que sera, sera. Sing it, Doris.

But Bookivore knows that readers are MADE, not BORN. And reading takes work. And patience. And repetition. And repetition some more. And eventually, you will see improvement. But it may take a while. It may take much longer than you're comfortable with. I know I passed comfortable about 4 months ago.


Finally, we're seeing results. But know this: he still skips words, still skips lines, still misses really crucial parts of the story -- after reading The Dragon in the Sock Drawer, he couldn't tell me the dragon's name or how they finally got the egg open. So obviously we have more work to do. But the motivation is there, and it wasn't there before, so that's a step in the right direction.

Here are some other steps I'm going to take:

• I'm having his eyes checked at his physical this summer. I think they're OK, but it's best to be sure.
• I'm having him summarize (verbally) everything he reads so I can get a sense of what he's understanding from the story.
• I'm still making him read aloud to me, for the same reason.
• I'm encouraging him to use his finger to follow the text as he reads so he doesn't skip things.
• I'm talking through the Good Reader's Habits as we read.

And I'm keeping at it.