How The Read-Aloud Handbook Works for Us, Part 1

 Jim Trelease's book The Read-Aloud Handbook was given to us when our first son was born five years ago. It seems to have only gotten more popular since then, even though it was first published over thirty years ago! We have the 5th edition, published in 2001.

It is chock-full of information about why, how, when, and where to read aloud, and the interaction between reading, TV, and the Internet. Perhaps the best thing about the book is its extensive Treasury of Read-Alouds, categorized by type and children's ages. The types are: Wordless Books, Predictable Books, Reference Books, Picture Books, Short Novels, Full-Length Novels, Poetry, Anthologies, and Fairy and Folk Tales.

Without opening the book again, I can remember certain points that were salient to me:

1. Read aloud no matter what the age of the child. Infants benefit and so do teenagers.

2. It's okay for children who are interested in them to read comic books, graphic novels, and other materials. The idea is for children to learn to love to read, not for them to read all the great classics and nothing else. There is a reason great classics are classics, but did you know many of them are now available in graphic novel form? Anything that gets a child's interest will lead to more reading, including the original books eventually, one may hope.

3. The biggest predictor of whether or not children will love reading is whether or not their parents love reading and show it. A home full of books, magazines, newspapers, and reading parents will produce children who love to read. Borrowing them from the library is exciting, free, convenient, and offers more variety than a home library, but there is also a section in The Read-Aloud Handbook that talks about the importance of a home library and how to build a good one.

In a recent post from Chronicles of a Babywise Mom, I was reminded that the book also talks about the impact of the kinds of materials parents read. 95% of children whose mothers read novels had a high interest in books. The same high percentage did not hold up for fathers who read novels. However, 91% of children whose fathers read newspapers had a high interest in books.

Like many parents and educators, I am so enthusiastic about The Read-Aloud Handbook that I need two posts to talk about it. My second post will contain the specific ways we implement the ideas from the book, and any setbacks we have experienced in reading to our children.

Typing as a Writing Activity

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The above is an example of a writing activity for young children. It is my older son's attempt at a typed sentence. Typing activities can be a fun and useful change of pace from manual writing exercises. Children need manual writing practice as well, but in the early stages the focus is on the difficulty of the mechanics. Typing gives them a chance to work on sentence structure, capitalization, and spelling without worrying about the physical dexterity challenge that goes with handwriting.

Computer activities can kick-start learning for children who are fascinated with computing. They tend to learn fast if they're doing something exciting.

The idea of typing as a language arts activity came from the book Your Child At Play: Three to Five Years: Conversation, Creativity, and Learning Letters, Words and Numbers by Marilyn Segal. I recommend the book for an easy read about what's going on in preschoolers' minds and development. It has tons of easy suggestions for parents to try with their children, including the idea to let preschoolers play in word processing documents and even start an email account to correspond with friends and relatives. (Of course, parents should control all computer and online activity with kids, especially kids this young. I help my son send emails to his grandma, and that's about all we do with his account.)

Storybook Week 2: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom was written by Bill Martin, Jr., and John Archambault and was illustrated by Lois Ehlert. This is another classic children's book, one that many people call the best storybook for children under six. It should be readily available at the library, on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com, or in brick and mortar book shops. We have the DVD as part of the Scholastic Treasury of 100 Storybook Classics. (I do not get any benefit from recommending these sites, books, or DVDs - they are simply things that I have used and liked.)

1. Coconut Tree Craft

Arts and Crafts/Story Interest


Read the book or watch the DVD together. Use this simple Coconut Tree Craft from DLTK's Growing Together website.

Adjust for toddlers and younger preschoolers by cutting and/or pasting for them.


For older children or those who have an interest, look up coconut tree facts and pictures to learn more. Show them on the map where coconut trees mostly grow. Here at 4to40.com are some facts about coconuts.

2.  Letters Come Tumbling Down

Story Interest

For this activity, you will need a foam, magnet, or other set of letters of the alphabet. Use the coconut tree craft you made in Activity 1. With your child, play out the story with these letters. Have A ask B to go up the tree. March or skip the letters up the tree and set them in the branches or leaves or on the top of the tree. When they have all gotten up the tree, make them tumble down!

For a toddler: 

Make a big deal of the tumbling down part. Shake the paper tree until the letters fall down. Pick up the letters again and repeat the activity. This will be even more fun for a toddler if you get a box or container and tape or glue the picture of the tree inside the container. It will become another way for toddlers to play the clean-up-dump-out-clean-up-dump-out game. (I know my toddler loves this game!)

3. Be a Letter

Dramatizing/Sensory Activity

Use your own and your child's bodies to form letters of the alphabet on the floor. Your child may like to stand up and form the shape of a letter as best she can on her own in order to act out part of the story. It would be even better to have someone on hand to take pictures of this activity.

For a toddler:

Try forming the letter A by standing with legs apart and arms overhead with palms together. Say, "A! I'm the letter A!" See if your toddler can imitate you. Take pictures!

4.  Who Wrote the Book?
Language Arts

For this activity, you will need the book physically on hand. You may also want to have other books written by Bill Martin, Jr., or illustrated by Lois Ehlert to look at. There are many books by these two at the library.

For a preschooler or kindergartner: Open to the title page and tell your child that this is called the title page, and that every book has one. Show them what information is on the title page.

Tell them that the person who wrote the words in the book is the author. Give them the author's name. If you have other Bill Martin, Jr., books, show those to your child and point out his name on each of the title pages.

Explain how the person who drew (or created) the pictures in the book is called the illustrator. If you have other Lois Ehlert books on hand, show them to your child and point out her name on the title pages.

Ask, "Who is the author of this book?", pointing to Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

Ask, "Who illustrated this book?"

For a toddler or baby: Read and show books by Bill Martin, Jr., or illustrated by Lois Ehlert. Continue as long as it holds your baby's or toddler's interest. Keep the books near to look at them and read from them throughout the next week or two.

5. Cook a Coconut

Cooking/Sensory Activity

CDKitchen has an Easiest Coconut Pie recipe that children can help with. Older children can help with all of the recipe; younger children can pour or toss in the shredded coconut. The Homemade Baby Food website says that coconuts are not a common allergenic food and has more information on babies and coconut. According to that site, coconuts are not related to peanut or tree nut allergies but are related to latex allergies. Please use your pediatrician's guidance to determine what your baby can safely eat.

If you can find one and have the money in your grocery budget, it would be very helpful to buy a real coconut so your child can handle it, look inside (once an adult cuts it for them), and compare the shredded coconut to the whole coconut. Chowhound has some readers' ideas for using a whole coconut.

Quickest Ever Scrapbook

If you are like me and will never finish putting together a photo album or special-event scrapbook, here is the Quickest Ever Scrapbook that allows you to have physical results in hardly any time.

Step 1:

Forget about perfection. Would you rather have a product or not have a product? This is what I have to ask myself when putting together the Quickest Ever Scrapbook.

Step 2:

Buy the simple two-pocket, three-hole folders whenever you see them on sale. I think I got my last stockpile for a few cents each during school supplies shopping season. The project becomes even easier if you buy letter stickers whenever they are on sale.

Step 3:

Take pictures of the event.

Step 4:

Print out a coloring page that goes with the theme of the event. Have your child color it and glue it to the front of the folder. You could also use stickers or any other kind of decoration that is quick and easy for you and your child.

Step 5:

Use letter stickers to spell out the name of the event.

Step 6:

Print out some of your photos and gather together any other items from the event like tickets, cards, or brochures.

Step 7:

Use a three-hole punch to punch holes in the printed photos, cards, and anything else that can fit into the three-hole punched section of the folder. The odds and ends that don't fit can be put into the folder's pockets or glued around the inside and outside of the folder. Some folders have brads to attach the pages and some don't. If your folder does not have brads, simply tie string or thin ribbon through the holes to contain the pages.

Step 8:

You're done!

I have a folder full of little trinkets, cards, and items from my son's birthday last year. It is one year later and I still have done nothing with it. This year I gave myself permission to make the Quickest Ever Scrapbook, and I have already finished this year's birthday scrapbook:

Fitting Learning Time Into Your Day Part 3

Part Three of this series is for...
Parents Who Work Full-Time while their kids are at school or daycare

For Part One of the Fitting Learning Time Into Your Day series, click here. For Part Two of this series, click here. 


So when do full-time working parents with children who are at school or daycare find time to do learning activities? All of the ideas below are great opportunities for learning. They require a lot of parental patience, but then again, so do most daily activities.

Mealtime! 

Though it may be aggravating, let your child help prepare meals. On busy weeknights, even a young child can help tear lettuce, stir, pour, or arrange toppings. On weekends, maybe he can assist with pancakes, omelets, or even grilling out. Cooking activities provide practice with math (measuring, fractions), manual dexterity, safety precautions, creative expression, language arts (reading recipes), life skills, and generally learning to be a helpful person. You just have to be willing to let your little chef get into the process. 

During dinner, you could use conversation papers in a jar. One family member gets to draw a slip of paper on which you have all written ideas for family dinner conversation. As parents, you can make sure that the educational topics you want to cover are in the jar.

If you want to do some geography or history during dinner, post maps or time lines on the walls around the dinner table and talk about those. If you have younger children, you could post ABCs, numbers, colors, or shapes, and sing the ABC song before or after the start of dinner.

Field Trips

Weekends are precious time for full-time working parents. They can also be completely taken over by sporting events, grocery shopping, cleaning, and maintenance around the house. Make any of your planned events into a learning field trip by:


1. Researching what you are going to do
2. Making lists to prepare for the event
3. Using The Notebooking Fairy's field trip learning worksheet to record what your child wants to learn, already knows, and ends up learning
4. Mapping the route
5. Taking pictures 

and/or

6. Putting together a quick scrapbook of the event.


These steps can work for everything from a grocery shopping trip to a miniature golf outing to a traditional road trip. In fact, a backyard camp-out could be planned the same way for an economical, time-saving, and easy family event.

Bedtime

I bet many parents feel like I do at the children's bedtime: I could go to sleep myself, and appreciate the opportunity more than they do! However, this is a key time of day to connect with your child about the events of the day, feelings, planning the next day, and reading or storytelling. There are fabulous resources available to help parents plan read-alouds, teach children about chores and organizing themselves for the next day, and learn effective ways of talking about emotions. I will be posting more about my favorite resources for these learning activities in future posts.

TV Time

There are families (including mine) who sometimes find themselves sharing family time in front of the TV. Turn the "idiot box" into something slightly more like a "learning box" by choosing quality programming such as Nature specials, Nova science specials, your family's treasured videos, and PBS children's shows. 

In fact, for some "physical education," families with a Nintendo Wii could get in some rainy-day exercise together by playing the sports games. I don't have experience with this because my children are a bit too young and we don't have a Wii, but any kind of mental or physical exercise can balance out some of TV's negative aspects just a bit. 

As soon as your children are old enough, begin to teach about the purpose of commercials and how commercials are made. You could go in depth and have each family member create a commercial. Help them think critically about what commercials are trying to get them to do.


Bottom line: If you know your family is going to be watching TV anyway, make that time count for something positive.


Bottom bottom line: I am sure working parents are already doing these types of activities with their children. The trick is to be as mindful as possible about the time you are spending.

Good Things: the Catwings series

It has been difficult to predict which chapter books my five-year-old will like and which ones will cause him to avoid read-aloud time. We have been reading chapter books together for about a year now. Our pattern was that I read aloud to him from a book of my choice after lunch, and he picked a story or book to be read to him at bedtime.

When we started The Chronicles of Narnia (one of my everlasting favorites), he was on board for the whole series. In fact, he has started to ask for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at bedtime again. I guess we are starting the series over.

When we started Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, which I thought a four-year-old (or at least a five-year-old) would surely love, he tried everything he could to skip read-aloud time. It was such a struggle for his interest that I finally stopped reading it to him when we were on the last chapter!

The series I want to mention in this post is one I found in the library. The author, Ursula K. Le Guin, wrote one of my favorite teen-adult-fantasy series, the Earthsea trilogy. When I saw her name in the children's section, I figured these books had to be good. My son agreed. We have read as many as we could get our hands on.

The books are about Catwings. Cats with wings. And there you have it.

Somehow the author evokes universal fears, challenges, and triumphs of childhood without writing down to her young readers. The Catwings books are a quick read, interesting to different ages, and they passed muster for our read-aloud time. The illustrations, done by S.D. Schindler, are very nice as well. The editions in our library have hard covers over smooth, slightly shiny pages that, to me, are a joy to hold and turn.

Publishers Weekly recommends the Catwings series for ages seven through ten and School Library Journal for grades two through four. I found it a perfect fit for my four-year-old. For children who are not used to listening to chapter books, I might recommend six years old as a starting point. At that point, some children may be able to read them on their own.

Storybook Week 1: Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3

Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3 was written by Bill Martin Jr., and Michael Sampson. It was illustrated by Lois Ehlert. The very first step in the Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3 Storybook Week is to get a copy of the book and/or the video (Weston Woods Scholastic, 2005). The book is readily available in libraries, on Amazon.com, and in bookstores. The DVD is available on Amazon as well, and as part of the Scholastic Treasury of 100 Storybook Classics.

1. The Numbers of Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3

Read-Aloud/Story Interest

Read the book or watch the Weston Woods Scholastic story video. For the following activity, use a pack of number flashcards (about $2-$3 at a convenience store like Walgreens) or make them yourself.

To make number cards, simply type the numbers in a large font size in a word processing document, leaving spaces between each number. You may want to use different colors for each number or do every 10th number in the same color, or any other idea you think would be fun. Print on card stock. Cut the numbers out in squares.

Take from the pack the numbers 1-20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 99, and 100. Ask your child to put these numbers in the order that they appear in the story.

For a baby or toddler: Show the flashcards, one by one, and say the number out loud. 1-10 is probably plenty for this age group. For an older baby or toddler, hand the card to them so they can look at it more closely. Better yet, use the foam numbers you can find in grocery stores, Amazon.com, or the baby aisle of Target.

For an older child: After doing the above activity, have your child reverse the order and count backwards down to 1.

2. Counting by Tens

Sensory learning/Math concepts

Use this free ebook by Jim Erskine for Candy Math ideas to learn counting by tens with candy or colored cereals. It is part of the first activity in the ebook, titled Skip Counting.

3. Bumblebees!

Science concepts/Arts and crafts

Go on a bumblebee hunt outside. If the season or area is not a good one for bumblebees, read together a book or website about bumblebees, like this one. It is always fun to bring a magnifying glass or binoculars, if your preschooler has either of these.

For toddlers: Point to as many pictures of bumblebees as you can find and make the "bzzz, bzzz" sound. Together, pretend to be bumblebees and go buzzing around the house.

For babies: Make a bumblebee puppet and have it buzz over the pages of the book. If baby has older siblings, they could be in charge of making the puppet. This is a fun puppet that would be a good project for a preschooler. Be sure the baby is never left alone with it because the antennae, tape, and/or bag could be unsafe for babies. If you are a knitter, this is a cute bee knitting pattern that you could make with or without the cord.

4. Number Four

Fine motor skills/Number recognition

Ask your child to write a large block number 4. Or write it yourself or draw tracing guidelines for younger children. Have your child color it, then cut out the outline of the number. A child who needs an easier cutting activity can cut out the number in a square if you draw the guidelines.

5. What Happened?

Narration/Thinking about the story

Ask your child:
"Who was left out of the tree?"
"Why was zero crying?"
"What happened at the end?"

If your child needs more writing practice have him or her write out the answers. If your child is younger or does not yet write, write down the answers as he or she speaks to show the attention you are paying to their answers.