Readers Win!

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me fell like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”  - Nora Ephron

People who love to read have a huge advantage. Fostering a love of reading in children may be one of the greatest gifts parents and teachers can give.

Readers learn important thinking skills. They must be decoders and analyzers. Readers have to make sense of information and discover patterns in it. They must remember details and put them together. Readers learn to look at the big picture and the tiny mosaic tiles that make it up.

Readers must sustain attention. There is an epidemic of attention disorders. While there may be many causes, the fast visual pace of games, movies, television, and websites does not encourage children to focus. Reading does. A child must concentrate for a prolonged period of time to read. Even small children can learn to sit and listen to an adult reading. That is why it is critical that parents read to their children even before these children recognize letters or words. They learn to maintain focus.

Readers live in language. While some backward places are still teaching vocabulary through drills and lists, the current research tells us that, if we want kids to develop their vocabularies, they must read. It is not enough to memorize a word and its definition; there must be some context for that meaning. Meaning disembodied dies.

Years ago, I took over a class that was designed to strengthen students’ vocabularies. The prior teacher had given students dictionaries and had them look up lists of words and memorize them. We refocused the course on reading. The first year I taught the reading based curriculum, kids would identify words from the prior year. “Mr. Hirsch, this word was on the last year’s list!” When I asked them what it meant, they could never remember.

Like music, reading is about decoding and translating. Readers learn to love that process. Although students can get hooked into reading with an interesting topic, many readers will read anything because they like the process of reading! It is better to read something interesting, true, but intense readers will read because the act itself is fulfilling.

Students who look critically at their reading will learn to question, evaluate, and imagine. They realize that there are different ways to see the world and they must find strategies to weigh differing points of view. Readers become critical thinkers!

A study even found that one of the best predictor of student success in school was not parents’ income, level of education, or school quality but the number of books in their homes. My parents’ library was a message and a goal for me. I wanted to be able to read the books my folks were reading. It gives me great pleasure when my children want to read the books on my shelves.

Reading is the primary skill. Reading is the basic foundation of learning and thinking. It cannot be overemphasized. Strong, focused, and critical readers are the real gifted students!