Read with Me: Helping Parents Help Children

No surprises here: a recent survey underscores the importance of reading to and chatting with children in their first years as a vital building block to speech and literacy.

We asked ASCD Annual Conference presenter Bill Driedger (Read with Me: Helping Parents Help Children) to share how his personal and professional experiences with literacy instruction have shaped his mission to get families reading together. By including prereading activities in everyday life and play, reading became part of his kids' everyday world and a positive experience that translated into a love of learning.

Inservice: Why focus on whether students are reading at home?

Bill Driedger: Partly, questions from concerned parents spurred my work with family literacy. They went something like this, "I'd like to teach my 4-year-old to read; do you have any materials or resources to help me with this?" I knew what they really wanted-—a polished set of lesson plans to use for formal reading instruction with their preschoolers.

On the other hand I saw what my wife, a highly effective kindergarten teacher (only a slight bias here), was doing with our children at home. So many everyday activities became engaging learning opportunities for our children, often centered on literacy. "’T’ for Thomas," my three-year-old would hear her say as he played with Thomas the Tank Engine. He learned the alphabet (really) through playing with the many train engine friends of the popular book and TV character.

Well-used, and chewed, books were everywhere-—only on occasion found on the book shelf. Trips to the grocery store, post office, or doctor’s clinic were filled with constant conversation, explanation, and exploration. We made up our own silly rhymes around the dinner table (still do, likely to the embarrassment of my oldest child), exposing our children to sounds and patterns in words. When they entered kindergarten, I noted how quickly and easily the act of reading came to them, both decoding and comprehension. And just as important, I saw a real love of reading and learning.

There are many prewalking stages that a child must progress through before she will be able to take those first few steps. Likewise, there are many prereading experiences, not unlike those mentioned above, that can bring a child to the point where they are ready to read. These experiences must touch on oral language development, phonemic awareness, understanding print, interacting with books, and so on. As educators, we need to help our parents, grandparents, or other guardians provide these types of rich activities for their children. 

In some homes this type of behavior is common; in others it is much too scarce. Research-based literature tells us that it is common for the learning (or reading) gap found in kindergarten to widen though the formal schooling years. Tips for parents on how to start the reading journey don't have to be tied to an ironclad top ten list. Instead, consider fun and engaging activities organized by space (in the home or in the community) and time (during mealtime or when shopping for groceries). Parents looking for help teaching their child to read are really asking for help identifying prereading experiences that are indipsensable for eventual reading success. And really, those experiences are all around us, not just in the classroom.

Catch Driedger's session, Read with Me: Helping Parents Help Children (3107), Monday, March 8, 2010, 8:00–9:00 a.m., at ASCD's Annual Conference in San Antonio, Tex.