Dumber in the Summer?!?

So... I really intend on updating this blog more than I actually do, but life is busy! And reading to my kids is more important right. Anyway, since I don't post often you should know that EVERY post is important! :)

Anyway... my kids get out of school on Thursday. The little ones are looking forward to having the big ones home and so am I (most of the time anyway). I am PREPARED... we have their Summer Bridge workbooks to help them retain the math skills they picked up this summer. And we have LOTS of books. We will be getting more too! Each year at this time I let my kids each choose a couple of books that I purchase for them to give them something to look forward to reading.

Last summer, I had the amazing opportunity of listening to reading expert Jim Trelease speak. One of the things he emphasized was the importance of summer reading. Children who do not read during the summer actually REGRESS and lose a significant amount of knowledge they gained during the school year. Sad! This little bit of "loss" accumulates and by the time they are in Fourth Grade they are quite a bit behind their peers.

I know, as parents, it is tempting to think that the kids need a break, it is hard to make daily reading a priority when there is no one to be accountable to (like a teacher), and summers can be so busy!! BUT... reading daily is the most important thing you can do this SUMMER!

In future posts, I plan on sharing some ideas for getting kids involved in reading during the summer. That is the plan anyway! :)

p.s. Jim Trelease has an amazing brochure on reading. I plan on passing them out at my Usborne Books booth this weekend.
Here is a link: http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/summer-reading.pdf

Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!

Today is Read Across America Day (which is celebrated on Dr. Suess' birthday.) To celebrate this year our little boys will be eating green eggs and ham for lunch. And we'll read that book too! Maybe One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish too because I always liked that one when I was little. We'll read all day! For our big kids it is double the bedtime stories! (Meaning we'll read two chapters of this book to them tonight instead of one. They are always begging for more.)And even though it is Dr. Seuss' birthday my kids will each get a present tonight... a new book. :)

Now something I learned about Dr. Seuss and kids... When my oldest was a brand new baby I joined the Dr. Seuss book club and was mailed one Dr. Seuss book/month for about a year. I read them to my little guy because we didn't have very many books then so I read what we had. As my kids got older they did not like me to read them Dr. Seuss. I was perplexed... how can a kid NOT like Dr. Seuss. One year on Dr. Seuss birthday my kids came home from preschool wearing tall red and white hats and my daughter declared, "Today is Dr. Seuss' birthday. We had a party. I do not like Dr. Seuss books they are boring and weird."

Then, one day a few months later, when that same child was a newish reader I found her reading a stack of Dr. Seuss books to her little brother. She suddenly loved Dr. Seuss because the rhyming words and rhythm made his books easy, fun books to read by herself. (Definitely more fun than the controlled vocabulary books she was bringing home from school.) She loved to read Dr. Seuss for about a year and then she moved onto bigger and better things... like chapter books :). So don't panic if your little kids don't like Dr. Seuss. Wait until they are reading a little and use them to build confidence in a beginning reader.

Anyway... Happy Read Across America today!

The Early Literacy Crisis

http://www.parenting.com/article/Baby/Daycare--Education/The-Early-Literacy-Crisis#
The Early Literacy Crisis: A Mom Congress Special Report
Too few books and too little time are adding up to a disaster for some of the nation's youngest learners.
By Lisa Moran, Parenting

The Vanda Early Learning Center in Lubbock, TX, sits between two cotton fields, with a bright-blue sign out front and a globe painted on the sidewalk. It's a cheery spot for the children who come here, nearly all of whom qualify for the federal free-lunch program. With its state-endorsed kindergarten-readiness program, it also represents a critical opportunity for them to avoid ending up like the 22 percent of adults over age 25 in Lubbock who don't have a high school diploma.

Zadrian Rodriguez was at high risk of becoming one of those statistics because his mother, Amelia, was struggling to raise three young kids on her own. "I was working long hours and I didn't have time to sit down with them or read to them," she says. Like more than half of the families whose children attend Vanda, Rodriguez also didn't have any books at home. And those are huge problems.

Research has repeatedly shown that access to books and one-on-one reading time is an important predictor of future literacy skills.

Reading to your baby from infancy on exposes her to the alphabet, to the sounds that words make, and to the idea that print letters translate into spoken words. Talking to your child about a story boosts understanding and vocabulary. In contrast, not having this language and literacy exposure can quickly set kids like Zadrian and his siblings up for failure. Many children who enter kindergarten without pre-reading skills in place never catch up, according to "America's Early Childhood Literacy Gap," a 2009 report from Jumpstart, a national early education organization dedicated to advancing school readiness in low-income communities. "By second grade, we can predict with reasonable accuracy who will go on to higher education and who will not, based on their literacy skills," says Jumpstart board member Laura Berk, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Illinois State University.

A parade of experts echo this sentiment: If a child isn't caught up by third grade, "it requires intense intervention to close this gap," says Janice Im, senior program manager at Zero to Three, a nonprofit that promotes healthy development in babies and toddlers.

"We have faith in education and how it works, but the truth is that these kids don't catch up no matter how good their schools are," agrees Adam Ray of the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the media giant, which helps fund Jumpstart's work.
Having reading difficulties also increases the odds that a child will drop out of school and have a criminal record. States like California and Indiana have even factored in the number of third-graders who are not reading at grade level when planning future jail construction. But the news isn't all bad: There's a growing understanding of the urgent need to help young kids develop literacy skills, and organizations like Jumpstart are stepping in to help.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES
In 2002, government agencies convened the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) to understand what helps children from birth to age 5 learn to read when they get to school. Their report, "Developing Early Literacy," released last year, analyzed 500 studies and used the results to define a specific set of skills that predict later literacy achievement for children in kindergarten, explains NELP panel chair Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D., director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We're not talking about sitting kids down with workbooks," notes Shanahan, "but you still need a plan to teach a child literacy skills through play."
Children also need access to books, and far too many don't have that. While a child growing up in a middle-class neighborhood will own an average of 13 books at any given time, low-income communities average about one book for every 300 children, according to University of Michigan professor Susan Neuman, Ed.D., author of Changing the Odds for Children at Risk. Even all libraries aren't created equal: School libraries in low-income areas average half the number of children's books as those in middle-income neighborhoods, and public libraries in these communities often have more restrictive hours of operation. "Physical and psychological proximity to books and reading materials is critical. A child can't pick up a book that isn't there," says Neuman.

A language-rich environment, in which parents talk to their children, ask questions, and involve them in an ongoing dialogue, is also essential to emerging literacy. One often-cited study estimates that by the time kids enter school, there can be a difference of 30 million words between the vocabularies of children growing up in well-off households versus the vocabularies of children in poorer ones. These children "often haven't been exposed in their interactions with their parents to the alphabet, vocabulary, and language skills," according to Susan Landry, Ph.D., founder and director of The Children's Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in Houston.

HELP IS ON THE WAY
Enter groups like Jumpstart, whose corps of volunteers, a nationwide team of trained community residents and college students, provides intervention in 260 preschools and childcare facilities. Corps members spend six to eight hours each week -- for an entire school year -- reading with kids and doing activities that develop social, language, and literacy skills. The results so far have been impressive: A 2008 review of Jumpstart's program run out of Illinois State University found that the children who received literacy intervention showed fall-to-spring gains in achievement -- on three different tests -- that were two to three times greater than children who did not participate in the program. Zadrian Rodriguez, now 6, benefited from the Jumpstart corps while attending Vanda, and his sister, Nazlyn, 5, is part of the program as well.

Washington seems to be on board, too: Last year's stimulus bill allocated $5 billion for early learning programs like Head Start, a federal program that provides comprehensive early-childhood development services to low-income children. It also included $5 billion in challenge grants to encourage innovative programs that work toward closing "the achievement gap."

The next step: States also need to make early education more accessible. Research has shown that public pre-kindergarten programs increase high school graduation rates, improve academic outcomes, and reduce the number of children who require special-education services, says Marci Young, the director of Pre-K Now, a group working to make quality pre-kindergarten available for all 3- and 4-year-olds. Currently, only 24 percent of 4-year-olds and 4 percent of 3-year-olds in the U.S. are in a state-funded program, according to Pre-K Now.

Public awareness and support for programs that encourage reading is essential as well. A poll by the Pearson Foundation and Jumpstart found that while 95 percent of Americans consider early childhood literacy an important issue, they were not aware that reading to a child between the ages of 3 and 5 is critical for future achievement.

Zadrian Rodriguez is proof of that. Now a first-grader at Hodges Elementary in Lubbock, the little boy loves reading the books he brings home from the school library. His sister, Nazlyn, just got her first book, Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, from her participation in Jumpstart's program. Wednesdays are Zadrian's favorite day at school because that's when they have spelling tests. "He loves when he gets a hundred," says Amelia Rodriguez. "We put it on the refrigerator and we all give high fives." With enough noise, maybe state and federal elected officials can also give a big high five to early literacy education for all.

Parent's Magazine Contest

One school will win $5,000 in free books. Details are at: http://www.parents.com/reading/school

Back to School

Many parents are sending their children back to school this week. And undoubtedly many kids will come home with leveled books to read as part of their homework each evening. This is wonderful because practice is so important.

BUT, that does NOT mean parents should stop reading to their kids. In fact, Jim Trelease reports on studies that have found a child's enjoyment in reading goes down at the same time the are no longer read to. Until fourth grade, kids listening comprehension is much higher than their reading comprehension. So, kids can enjoy listening to a more complex and interesting story that won't be able to read by themselves for several years.

So please listen with joy as they building reading skills by reading their levelled books. And then let them listen with joy as you read to them.

Happy Back to School!

Summer Reading

This post comes a little late since summer is coming to a close and school starts for my kids in just 3 weeks. BUT, I just learned this when I heard Jim Trelease speak and it is very shocking.

Like it or not, there is a HUGE achievement gap between rich, middle class, and poor kids. (Obviously, this isn't always every case and love of reading makes a huge difference in those instances, but statistically speaking it is true.) Mr. Trelease said that kindergarten teachers are miracle workers because although poor kids enter school a year behind academically, by the end of kindergarten they catch up. Sadly, though most of what they gain is lost over the summer.

WHY? Because they are not read to and/or required to read during the summer.

Eventually, by the time they reach fourth grade, the poor kids are two full grades behind in reading. And it is all due to reading loss over the summer.

You can see the startling chart on Mr. Trelease's website: http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/web-charts/summer-loss.pdf.

So READ, READ, READ to those kids for the next 3 weeks. If they can read themselves have them read to you! Because kids who read 20 min./day have been known to go up to 2 reading levels over the summer. If they seem like they've lost a little, that is fine... just start where they are now and work back up.

Summertime is not the time for a vacation from reading!

Let's Party!!

I spent the last week in Oklahoma celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Usborne Books and More at our National Convention. It was amazing!! Some of the highlights (in no particular order):

1. Being whisked away from the airport in a limo. Here are me, Bobbi, and up-up-upline supervisor Deb Casey in the limo.2. Enjoying a delicious steak dinner and a live, outdoor presentation of one of my all-time favorite musicals Oklahoma! as a reward for making the President's Club.

3. JIM TRELEASE!!! Have you read the Read Aloud Handbook? It is amazing and will make you a better parent. He signed my copy.

4. Not having to think about, prepare, or clean up meals and having my bed made everyday.

5. The Hawaii Celebration luncheon, team parties, late night "Name Game" sessions, and being with my wonderful friends (some that I only see 1-2 times each year).6. Flying First Class from Atlanta to Salt Lake. Let's just say... I could get used to that! I did pretty much deserve it after Delta kept ruining my day and I spent 12 hours in airports due to their incompetence. They screwed up my flight from Rome too. Let's just say we aren't impressed with Delta at our house. First Class though... was great!

7. It is always fun to be recognized for your efforts. The awards I received were: Supervisor of the Year Honorable Mention, #3 Central Group Recruiting, #4 Group Promotions, #4 Personal Recruiting, #11 Central Group Sales, and #15 Home Show Sales.

8. Coming home to my family. The kids had cleaned up the house (in their way) and Katie had laid out my pjs and the stuff in the picture below. What great kids!! Now back to reality...