POWERFUL BOOK FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS AND ANYONE INTERESTED IN READING ALOUD TO CHILDREN

First book I will introduce is not a picture Book. It is the 7th edition of the

“The Read-aloud Handbook,” written by Jim Trelease. This is a powerful book for parents, teachers and adminstrators. It is one of the most helpful books I have found for those interested in Reading-Aloud to children.

I became aware of this book when the 2nd edition was published. This book is the 7th edition and Jim Trealese is now retired. This will be the last edition published.

This quote is in the front of "The Read-Aloud Handbook."

We must take care that children's early encounters with reading are painless enough so they will cheerfully return to the experience now and forever. But if it's repeatedly painful, we will end up creating a school-time reader instead of a lifetime reader.

I remember when I was a first year 6th Grade t eacher. We used Readers to teach reading but to go along with the readers was a reading workbook for every student. I soon realised that I could spend my time teaching reading by actually reading books, or I could try to teach reading by using precious reading time to work on the workbook pages (workbooks or work sheets take away actual reading time). I knew that children learned to read by reading. So I would choose a few of the better pages to use in the classroom and have the students tear out a number of the pages to take home and do whatever they wanted with them. I felt bad about the waste of the pages but I also knew that it would be a terrible waste of precious reading time to spend too much time on the pages.