Confession: I was a bookworm as a kid. I felt shy around the neighborhood kids and preferred spending time with a book to hanging out with them. I reread the books in my room over and over, and always wished I had more.
It wasn't that bad of a peccadillo, I now realize. It made me comfortable with words, instilled in me an obdurate devotion to accurate spelling and propelled me into a 30-year writing career that's been blessed with plaudits and very few lachrymose moments.
Go ahead, look them up if you don't know them.
I wish every kid could love words. Getting comfortable with language, learning SAT vocabulary words like these, can open all kinds of doors for young people.
And now I'm getting downright worried for the kids that don't love reading, considering that next year an Ohio law takes effect requiring third graders to be held back if they're not reading at grade level.
This is a wake-up call that we'd be foolish to sleep through. We need to equip our children with the reading skills necessary to succeed in life.
And that means, "Read, read, read to them," says Kristina Waner, who coordinates the Literacy Cooperative's Supporting Tutors Engaging Pupils program at Marion-Sterling School in Cleveland. You can't start too young. A child's exposure to reading and language between the ages of 0 and 3 greatly influences his or her motivation and potential to learn, studies show.
So here's some good advice I've gleaned from the Literacy Cooperative and the Reach Out and Read organization. Feel free to use the tips that follow on your child. Or on your neighbor's child. Clip them out and give them to the young mother or father you work with. They're meant to be shared.
All you need is a child and a well-chosen book.
Step one: Before you even crack the book open, draw your young reader in with a conversation about what might be inside. Look at the cover and ask, What do you see? What do you think this story is about? Why?
Place your finger on the author's name and make sure the child knows that an author is the person who writes the words. Point to the illustrator's name and explain that's the person who draws the pictures.
Before you begin reading, flip through the book and get the child to anticipate what is about to happen: Where do you think this story takes place? Are there people in the story? Animals in the story?
Now it's time to read together. If the child is able to sound out words, let him or her take a turn reading next -- but you should go first.
Step two: Read it out loud, and fully enjoy it. Make the story come alive. Snort like a pig if you're reading "Happy Pig Day" by Mo Willems. If you're reading about trucks, create voices for the fire truck, the trash truck, the dump truck (of course they should sound different, silly).
Run your finger across the words as you read them.
Keep the child engaged by letting her or him turn the pages. Stop once in a while to ask questions: What do you think will happen next? Can you name two things that already happened?
On Tuesday, I watched reading tutor Ann Klonowski at work, engaging the busy brain of first-grader Tynaesia Greer at Marion-Sterling. "Where do you think she is?" Klonowski asked, holding a book with a picture of a girl on the cover.
"The beach," Tynaesia guessed, seeing sand, seashells, a ship and a brightly shining sun on the inside pages.
But this was a book with a great plot twist, as picture books go. On the last page, the little girl turned out to be standing in a sandbox in a beach display with the word "Sale" over it. Swimsuits were on the wall.
Tynaesia got the joke. "She's in a store!" she laughed.
The fun's not over when you get to the last page. It's time for step three: Ask the child to react to what you read: Did you like this story? Why or why not?
Prompt them to summarize the story: What happened at the beginning, middle and end? Ask imaginative questions that get their minds dancing, such as, if you were the main character, would you have done anything differently?"
I can't put a book into the hand of every child. But I can do the next best thing: Print these tips in the newspaper and hope they land like dandelion fluff, touching the lives of children all over Northeast Ohio.
To reach Margaret Bernstein: firstname.lastname@example.org, 216-999-4876 Previous columns online: cleveland.com/columns