+ Preschoolers Reading: One Modest Change Helps

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A Science Daily article reports on research done at Ohio Satate University which suggests that a small change in how teachers and parents read aloud to preschoolers can give children a big boost in later reading skills.

If parents and teachers simply make specific references to print in books as they read — pointing out letters or words or capital letters, showing that we read from left to right — a benefit shows up later on in school.

The study shows that preschool children whose teachers used print references during storybook reading showed more advanced reading skills one — and even two — years later, compared to children whose teachers did not use such references.

This is the first study to show causal links between referencing print and later literacy achievement.

Shayne Piasta, co-author of the study and assistant professor of teaching and learning as OSU says

Using print references during reading was just a slight tweak to what teachers were already doing in the classroom, but it led to a sizable improvement in reading for kids.

This would be a very manageable change for most preschool teachers, who already are doing storybook reading in class.

Piasta, along with Laura Justice, professor of teaching and learning at OSU, as well as Anita McGinty of the University of Virginia and Joan Kaderavek of the Univerity of Toledo, will publish the results in the April 2012 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study is part of the STAR (Sit Together and Read) project, a randomized clinical trial based at Ohio State to test the long- and short-term impacts associated with reading regularly to preschool children in the program.

Piasta also says it is particularly notable that students in the high-dose STAR classrooms scored higher on tests of reading comprehension.

How Do Print References Help Future Readers?

According to Piasta, research suggests print references help children learn the code and how these details relate to words and to meaning.

By showing them what a letter is and what a letter means, and what a word is and what a word means, we’re helping them to crack the code of language and understand how to read.

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sole source: un-bylined article at www.sciencedaily.com.  Journal reference: Shayne B Piasta, Laura M Justice, Anita S McGinty, Joan N Kaderavek, “Increasing Young Children’s Contact With Print During Shared Reading: Longitudinal Effects on Literacy Achievement.” Child Development, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j1467-8624.2012.01754.x  

Orton Gillingham Tutoring in Columbus Ohio: Adrienne Edwards 614-579-6021 or email aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com 

+ Bait the Reading Hook…

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ASCD’s publication Educational Leadership offered an article by Jennifer McCarty Plucker,  a reading coordinator and literacy specialist at Eastview High School in Apple Valley Minnesota.

She writes that research  indicates high-achieving students read more than low achievers. 

In Plucker’s suburban high school, she and her colleagues decided to narrow the discrepancy by “providing a double dose of literacy instruction” in an academic literary class required in addition to their 9th grade English class.

In the 2008-9 and 2009-10 school years, Eastview High School had four class periods of the course.  Each was taught by one of three highly trained and licensed reading teachers.

Classes were kept small (no more than 10 students per teacher).  Students were selected on the basis of standardized reading tests, informal reading assessments, and recommendations from the middle school reading specialist.  These were students typically whose scores on standardized tests were in the 10th-30th percentiles.

A minimum of 25 minutes of the 50-minute daily class were “held  sacred” for silent reading-for-enjoyment.

Once students have started reading for fun, the class brainstorms and sets goals for stealing minutes outside the school day for reading.

Developing the Materials

Eastview High School did not purchase a commercial reading program.  Instead, they created their own. 

They looked at their resources, considered students’ needs, and read widely in recent research on adolescent literacy.  Then they used their funds to build a classroom library with high-interest young adult novels, create an appealing and comfortable environment for teens – and also provide professional development for teachers.

Developing and maintaining a classroom library of high-interest young adult novels can be a challenge.  However, daily access to engaging books is imperative for the success of growing readers.  Yes, we lose books.  No, our classroom isn’t organized like our media center.  We tend to organize books by theme or likely audience, so we might have a table of sports books or of teen romances instead of books organized by authors whose names may be unfamiliar to struggling readers.

They work continually to find books that give students the right level of challenge.  A book can’t be so easy that students won’t grow, and it can’t be so difficult that the students won’t understand it.

Instructors help students figure out what books are just right for them.  By February of the school year, most students can  independently choose books that will accelerate their literary growth.

Strategies

Plucker writes that instead of teaching “strategies for strategies’ sake,” they take a reflective approach.

Teachers begin by helping students share their thinking as they read. Once they learn what “comes naturally” for each reader, they focus on honing skills in other areas.

When a student, for example, is reading difficult text with lots of description, he is encouraged to make a ”mental movie” as he reads. 

If a student is reading an article about current events, she is advised to ask questions.  Rather than get discouraged, she gets help using metacognitive strategies to clear up confusion as it happens.

Ultimately, we want our students thinking as they read, recognizing that reading is a complex process.  One student shared his newfound thinking skills when he came into my room last winter, saying “Dr. McCarty, I can’t listen to my iPod when I read anymore.  My metacognition voice is too loud!”

The instructors try to give students opportunities for choice and collaboration, as research suggests.  When more difficult texts require scaffolding, choices are more limited, but still there are choices. 

For example, if they are teaching students to annotate a text — to write their thoughts in the margin — they might offer them three current events articles, so they can choose the one that appeals to them most.

Then a student is asked to choose a purpose for reading: does he want (for example) to understand the author’s reasoning, or develop an argument against the author, or look for holes in the author’s logic?

At Eastview, they don’t make the classroom an electronics-free zone; rather they work with students to develop goals for taking control of distractions.

They also determine which literacy skills students use outside school, and then link these skills to academic tasks.  They have used online discussion forums, videos, digital posters, podcasts, texting and classroom social networking sites in order to engage students and allow them to use skills they already have for academic purposes.

Fluency Development

Just like elementary students, adolescents need to hear highly fluent readers.  These students won’t listen to read-alouds they consider “lame,” and so Plucker and her colleagues try for shared reading experiences that students think are really great.

Plucker says that her students enjoyed Skeleton Creek, by Patrick Carmen (Scholastic, 2009) — a novel written as a journal by a high school student named Ryan.   Ryan’s friend Sarah sends him videos via email, and these videos are available online at http://www.scholastic.com.

Plucker writes

Last winter, I knew we needed to incorporate small-group reading instruction.  But how was I going to make guided reading cool?  When in doubt, try an acronym.  We implemented CREW (Collaborative Reading Enhanced Work) Time.  Simply calling it CREW Time made it cool.

We adjusted our crews depending on what strategy or minilesson we felt the small group needed.  One minilesson we used with our crews was explicitly teaching students to take their reader response journal entries from lower-level thinking (making connections) to higher level thinking (making judgements).

Students need to practice reading aloud, but they resist vehemently.  So they were asked to create unrehearsed reading podcasts of a children’s story of their choice.  Nobody said no to reading into a microphone!

After a week of fun fluency activities disguised as games, students  then re-recorded the stories and compared the podcasts.  They were able to compare the difference and reflect on what they heard.

Then they experimented with readers’ theater.  Students made a field trip to a neighboring elementary school and performed stories for first grader.

Plucker and her colleagues feel that after three years, they have found an effective way to lure students into reading.  And the students evaluate the experience with words like fun, comfortable, a place to feel smart, my favorite class.

sole source: article in Educational Leadership, ASCD’s monthly publication, October 2010.  Author Jennifer McCarty Plucker can be reached at Jennifer.Plucke@gmail.com.

tutoring in Columbus OH:  Adrienne Edwards  614-579-6021 or email aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Teaching With Mysteries

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From Kim Haynes at TeachHub, some suggestions for engaging the interest of students. 

She suggests that you try using Web sites which offer “Five-Minute Mysteries,” for example Mystery Net ( http://www.mysterynet.com/ ) or U-Solve-It Mysteries ( http://www.scholastic-direct.com/usolveit/audiofiles/mm1.asp).  These sites offer very short stories which encourage careful reading or listening.

How about Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown?  Mysteries follow a predictable pattern, but keep the readers guessing.  Haynes suggests Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, or Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

You can get a student’s attention by just making the topic “mysterious.”  Kim Haynes suggests that you ask questions such as ”Why is this species becoming extinct?”  “Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?”  Talk about “unexplained events:”  the Loch Ness Monster or the Bermuda Triangle.  (But she warns that you have to be prepared yourself to deal with whatever arises out of such a conversation!)

For practicing math, Haynes suggests Math Maven,           http://teacher.scholastic.com/maven/ ,  a site that offers “capers” that need solving.  Every story is at a particular level of difficulty.  Topics range from whole number operations to geometry and probability. 

For teaching plot structure, just working with mystery stories is useful.  Such stories follow predictable patterns, so concepts such as exposition, “inciting incident,” and rising action are fairly easily observable.

And for adding content knowledge, Haynes suggests http://www.teacher.scholastic.com/histmyst/index.asp for history; http://www.eduweb.com/pintura/ for art; http://www.marshallschools.com/teachers/aldredgel/mystery/ for science.  For more options, Haynes says searching “mystery options” might gather interesting results.  In addition to learning content, these exercises teach tech skills too.

Old fashioned language in classic books can be a challenge for today’s young people.  — Edgar Allan Poe or the Sherlock Holmes stories –these texts can be an entry point into Victorian language.   They are shorter than the Brontes or Austen, and their plots appeal to boys. 

CSI in the classroom?  Science and technology play significant roles in solving crimes.  So take advantage of kids’ fascination with forensic science with some Crime Scene Investigation opportunities at http://www.sciencespot.net/Pages/classforsci.html .

Build writing skills with mysteries’ easily recognizable templates: there are basic character types, basic sequences of events, etc.    Use them to demonstrate setting: many rely on stormy weather and creepy locations to set mood.  Help your students analyze mystery stories and write one of their own. Visit http://www.mysterynet.com/learn/lessonplans/writing.shtml  or http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/everyone-loves-mystery-genre-796.html.

Students learn about research through mysteries — it’s a little known fact that mystery writers do lots of research before they write.  They need to know about law, or medicine, or unusual facts, historical details…  Help your students learn research skills by looking up information.  Ask them to read a story and then do the  research to prove whether the details are accurate.  Haynes warns you though — some crime stories get gory; so use your knowledge of your students and be prepared.

Other suggestions: read a mystery that connects to your subject.  She suggests the Periodic Table Mystery Series by Camille Minichino for science, Suzanne Adair’s Revolutionary War-era mysteries, or Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series set during the period just after World War I. 

sole source: Kim Haynes’s “Elementary My Dear Teacher: Teaching with Mysteries” at http://www.teachhub.com/news/article/cat/14/item/349 .  Visit TeachHub.com for teacher resources of all kinds!

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021  or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Build Your Child’s Library One Book At a Time

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Twenty by Jenny is a Web site that recommends books for kids.  Just click on your child’s age level and you will find recommendations just right for her or him.  http://www.twentybyjenny.com/

Jenny recommends 20 childrens’ classics in each of four age groups, to get you started.  Each month, if you sign up for her complimentary email newsletter, she will suggest a brand new book in each age group.

With more than 9,000 children’s books published each year, it’s hard to judge the best.  Check this out!

source: this site was suggested byThe 2 Sisters at their site http://www,thedailycafe.com. 

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com  

+ Comprehension Strategies: Watch Yourself Thinking

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Your mind is speaking while you read.  Most of us aren’t aware of it. 

In the book “Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction,” Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann contend that comprehension can be taught directly.

From Chapter One, here is  a list of metacognitive strategies — strategies for listening to the voice in your mind that speaks while you read.

• Monitoring for meaning –  knowing when you know, knowing when you don’t know
• Using and creating schema — making connections between the new and the known, building and activating background knowledge
• Asking questions — generating questions before, during, and after reading that lead you deeper into the text
• Determining importance — deciding what matters most, what is worth remembering
• Inferring — combining background knowledge with information from the text to predict, conclude, make judgements, interpret
• Using sensory and emotional image — creating mental images to deepen and stretch meaning
• Synthesizing — creating an evolution of meaning by combining understanding with knowledge from other texts/sources

“Mosaic of Thought: the Power of Comprehension Strategy,” by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann, 2nd ed. is published by Heinemann Publishing, 2007.  ISBN  13:978-0-325-01035-9; and 10:0-325-01035-8

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Central Ohio IDA Reading Conference, October 2009

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Save the date: Friday October 16, 2009.

The Central Ohio Branch of the International Dyslexia Association (COBIDA) is hosting a conference on Reading, at the Columbus OH Convention Center, 8:15 am – 5:00 pm.

Louisa Moats, Ed. D., one of the most respected writers and educators in the field, will address the conference.  Moats, an internationally renowned author, researcher and teacher trainer, will speak on

• “Science, Language, and Imagination in Teaching Students at Risk for Reading Failure” –morning keynote session
• “How Words Cast Their Spell” — afternoon workshop

Breakout sessions in the afternoon are targeted to diverse audiences: parents, administrators, teachers, and reading professionals.  Topics include multi-tiered reading programs, effective assessment, explicit & systematic teaching of reading comprehension, writing, social issues, technology and much more.

• Elaine McEwan-Adkins, Ed.D., author of “The Principal’s Guide to Raising Reading Achievement.”  Administrators’ workshop topic: ”Does your school have what it takes to teach them all to read?” 
• Linda Carnine, Ph.D. and  Susan Hanner, authors of “Direct Instruction: Reading Mastery” and “Corrective Reading.”  Topic: “Combining effective assessment and effective instruction: making RTI really work.”
• William L Heward, Ph.D, author of “Exceptional Children” and “Applied Behavior Analysis.”  Topic: “Seven faulty notions about teaching children to read.” 
• Eric Q Tridas, MD, a developmental pediatrician who specializes in the diagnosis and management of learning disabilities, ADHD, neurodevelopmental and behavioral problems.  Topic: “I ain’t got my ABC’s:  reading problems in kids.”

Contact Mary Damer at 614-538-9878; or call the  Cobida Helpline at 614-899-5711.  Online registration available by May 30th: www.cobida.org.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards  614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Messy House, Messy Mind? Or Not.

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From Emily Bazelon at Slate.com, a report about an academic article by Anna D Johnson and Anne Martin of Columbia’s Teachers College. 

The authors looked at the effect of household order on kids’ reading skills.

The sample is narrow: 455 kindergartners and first-graders, all twins, from Ohio and western Pennsylvania, nearly all white and middle class.  The children were divided into two groups: those whose mothers have above-average reading skills and those whose mothers are average readers.

In both groups, they controlled for socioeconomic status, which means that their results can’t be explained away by class differences.  (The research was done only with mothers, not fathers — double interviews cost more, and also the mother is “usually the best recorder” of family events.)

Both groups of mothers were asked how often their children were read to, as well as how often the kids amuse themselves with books.   

Then the mothers were asked a separate set of questions about order at home, designed to get at what researchers call “executive function.”  Sample answers were: “It’s a real zoo in our home, “The children have a regular bedtime routine,” and “We are usually able to stay on top of things.”

The amount of shared parent-child reading time did not matter, on average, for the reading skills of either group of kids.

• What mattered, for the kids of average-reader mothers, was how often a child amuses himself with books.
• What mattered, for the kids of the high-reading moms, was how orderly the family’s home was.

What does it all mean?  Well, says Bazelon in her post on Slate.com, it does not mean we should stop bedtime reading.  Lots of studies support the importance of such activity.  And, she says, we’re only talking here about one slice of kids – middle class.

Johnson and Martin admit that even for this group, the results may reflect mostly timing, since much of early-reading research involves preschoolers.

The authors offer another theory to explain their findings about the benefits of order.

Perhaps, they say, “household order taps a more fundamental characteristic of parents or households, such as maternal industriousness, planning ability, or conscientiousness, that gives rise to both orderliness and better reading skills in children.”

This is the idea of executive functioning, “planning and problem-solving abilities.”

Maybe order helps promote reading only among the children of the high-reading mothers because it’s what the authors call a “higher order element.”  It matters only, perhaps, once you’ve got the basics down: you’ve already read to them when they were tiny; you’ve already surrounded them with books.

According to Fred Morrison, professor of education and psychology at the University of Michigan, order and executive function are aspects of parenthood that hasn’t been studied much lately.  “This is an example,” he says, “of a new set of research that is opening up vistas of parenting we haven’t really looked at in the last 10 to 15 years.”

Morrison likes the Johnson-Martin study.  But he stresses — as do Johnson and Martin themselves — that the findings are preliminary; they haven’t been replicated.

He is also not convinced that order and organization actually account  for why some kids of high-reading moms learn to read earlier and better than other kids with similar moms.

Another aspect that’s also beginning to get attention, he says, is warmth and responsiveness.    Since Johnson and Martin didn’t measure this, we can’t know whether another explanation for their results about early literacy lies in how warm and responsive parents are — do they ask questions; do they encourage their childrens’ curiosity?   

sole source: Emily Bazelon’s Slate.com post on February 26, 2009.  www.slate.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ High School Texts Too Simple for SAT Preparation

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Marilyn Jager Adams, of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Science at Brown University, describes studies that have shown that the difficulty of the text in popular reading textbooks have been reduced. 

In addition, the simplification of language in these books was temporarily aligned with declines in SAT scores.

A study by Hayes, Wolfer and Wolfe (1996) observed that the average length of the sentences in books published between 1963 and 1991 was shorter than that of books published between 1946 and 1962.

The mean length of sentences in the seventh- and eighth-grade textbooks had decreased from 20 words to 14 words.  Hayes observed that it was “the equivalent of dropping one or two clauses from every sentence.”

In addition, the sophistication of the books’ wording also declined. 

Hayes et al.’s analysis indicated that the wording of eighth-grade school books from 1963 forward was as simple as that in books used by fifth graders before 1963, while the wording of twelfth-grade literature texts published after 1963 had been simplified from what was found in seventh-grade books before 1963.

This disparity between what students were reading in school and the passages required by the SAT might well explain students’ poor performance on their college entrance exams.

More significantly, however, teachers were failing to provide instruction or experience with “grown-up” text levels. 

Jager Adams feels this is a risky course of action when we should be preparing students for the demands of college reading and life in the outside world.

In 2006 ACT, Inc. raised the concern again.  They reviewed the poor performance of students on its college entrance exam and saw that more than half the students fell below the 21-point cut-off for college readiness in reading ability.

ACT analyzed student performance and determined that the major stumbling block for the students was complex text.

The ACT reading assessment is designed around three levels of textual complexity.  For the students whose performance fell below the 21-point benchmark, average performance on the complex texts was at chance levels.

Students who scored beyond the 21-point benchmark were found to steadily increase their performance, but they reached levels comparable to performance on texts classified as moderate and simple only among students who scored at least 35 of the 36 points possible.

Hayes et al. found that it was especially school books for students in grades 4 and up that were simplified in the years after 1962. 

They also found that, although the wording of schoolbooks for children generally inreased with grade level across grades 1 through 8, the same wasn’t true of high school books.

Instead, across grades 9 through 12 (and including AP course texts), the difficulty levels of the literature books were shown to differ little from one another or from the grade 7 and grade 8 offerings.

The high school science texts were significantly more difficult than their English books.  But even among science texts, only those designed for AP coursework presented difficulty levels comparable to the benchmark reference: a newspaper article.

Hayes and his colleagues have continued to research on language.  They found that the sophistication of the language in every single scientific magazine and journal published between 1930 and 1990 increased dramatically.

Writes Jager Adams

If it is a national goal to inspire more students to become engineers and scientists, then shouldn’t the difficulty of our schoolbooks have increased alongside?  If a goal is to ensure that our students will be able to stay sufficiently informed about scientific progress to conduct business, reflect on policy, and manage their family’s health and education, then at a minimum shouldn’t the difficulty of our school books keep pace with the difficulty of scientific publications aimed at the general public?

But most telling, she feels, was Hayes’s comparison of spoken and written language.  For these analyses, they sampled language from TV shows, mothers’ speech to children ranging in age from infancy to adolescence, conversations among college-educated adults (including from the Oval Office), and adults providing expert witness testimony for legal cases.

Regardless of the source or situation and without exception, the lexical richness of the oral language samples was staggeringly impoverished compared to written texts.

In fact of all the oral language samples evaluated, the only one that exceeded even preschool books in lexical range was the language of expert witness testimony.

And so, writes Jager Adams

The difference between the wording of oral and written language must lie at the crux of the literacy challenge, as it points up a profound dilemma.  On the one hand, the extent of this disparity implies that the great majority of words needed for understanding written language is likely to be encountered — and thus can only be learned — through experience with written text.  On the other hand, research has taught us that written text is accessible — and thus permits learning — only if the reader or listener already knows the vast majority of words from which it is constructed.  Indeed, research indicates that reading with comprehension depends on understanding at least 95% of the words in a text.

source: Marilyn Jager Adams “The Challenge of Advanced Texts: The Interdependence of Reading and Learning” in Elfrieda H Hiebert (Ed.), “Reading more, reading better: Are American students reading enough of the right stuff? ” (Guilford, 2009)  

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Reading Rockets: Great Site

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Reading Rockets   http://www.readingrockets.org/    is a project comprised of PBS Televisions programs, available on DVD and videotape.  It includes online services, including the web sites ReadingRockets.org and ColorinColorado.org, as well as professional development opportunities.

Reading Rockets aims to inform and inspire parents, teachers, childcare providers, administrators and others who touch the life of a child.   It provides accurate accessible information on how to teach kids to read and how to help readers who are struggling.

Go to the web site and click on the  tab “for Teachers” or the “for Families” or the “for Other Professionals.”  Or click “Reading Research.”  There is also a tab called ”Podcasts and Videos”  at which you can listen to or watch teachers and professionals explaining the latest research or delivering useful  methods of instruction in classrooms.

I just watched a panel discussion in which Louisa Moats described the best ways to teach spelling.  (Guess what — only allow “invented spelling” with the tiniest kids; as soon as possible, begin teaching sound/symbol relationships in a structured, sequential way!) 

There are webcasts and blogs.  This is a terrific site!

I was led to this site by “The Daily Cafe Free Tip of the Week”.  www.thedailycafe.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Books at Home Create Lifelong Readers: NEA Study

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Dana Gioia comes from a working-class background in California: you would never have predicted he’d grow up to lead a national literacy movement.

His Sicilian father rarely read a book.  His Mexican mother read periodicals, and did recite poems to him.  He grew up speaking Italian in a Mexican neighborhood.

But the death of an uncle left the family shelves full of books.  Gioia now credits those books for his intellectual development, two master’s degrees and a career as a writer of prose and poetry.  At the moment, he’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

He’s leading a crusade for more book reading, with influential NEA studies warning about a decline in reading.

The National Endowment for the Arts is responding with what is called the Big Read program.  Used in several cities and towns, the Big Read supplies books and teaching materials for community-wide programs, usually through public libraries.

In an article on Indystar.com, Ron Pulliam says Gioia absolutely attributes his literary leadership to those shelves full of academic and classic books.

“Everything else in that gritty, working-class neighborhood had nothing to do with artistic or intellectual life,” he says.  He became a bookworm; he frequented the local library.  But he kept it secret from his friends, not wanting to be known as a nerd.

Gioia’s experience has been verified in an NEA reading study.  Books in the home — even if the parents don’t necessarily read them — promote better scores not only in English, but also in science and math.

The study indicates that shelves of books are more important than income or parental educational background. 

“A poor family with books in the house will produce a child, on the average, who will do better in those subjects than a rich kid with no books in the house.  The data just shows the power of the home environment.”

In Indianapolis, Jay Height works with low-income families at a community center, sending books home with children.  He serves with United Way’s new book-reading push, called “Ready to Learn, Ready to Earn.” 

“If a kid even owns six books,”  he says, “it has a profound impact on test scores.”  If a kid has a book, he’s inclined to open it — and then he’s opened his mind to all kinds of possibilities.  “Kids, by nature, are inquisitive.”

The United Way effort in Indianapolis doesn’t stock bookshelves for families, but it does provide them with 12 books a year for preschoolers through “Early Reader” clubs  targeted to low-income families.

Middle class families, studies show, read to their preschool children from 1,000 to 1,700 hours before they enter first grade.  By contrast, children from low-income families have listened to only 25 hours of reading, on average.

sole source: Russ Pulliam’s article at www.indystar.com on 8/16/08.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com