Dear Dr. Sharp:

Aren’t you afraid that between video games, social networking, and virtual worlds, there’s no way today for books to compete? Even when software like ItzaBitza and ItzaZoo help kids learn to read, how in the world can anyone convince kids to choose reading – just plain old book reading – in their free time?

Link the Glories of the World to Books

This is a great question. An easy answer would be, “Ask J. K. Rowling,” but I think there are lots of other ways to draw kids to books, especially when they’re too young for Hogwarts drama. I’ve previously written that one way to get reluctant readers to read is to tie books to their personal interests. But please don’t wait until kids are at reading age to start building those interests and linking them to books. I recently gave a talk to mothers of preschoolers, and the number one on my list of tips for raising preschoolers to become readers was… Boom-di-yada.

Have you seen the Boom-di-yada ad for Discovery Channel?

That’s it! Get kids passionately interested in the world, and books will become a way for them to spend time with what they love. They won’t be able to resist.

The “Fun-to-Work” Ratio

You see, one secret to what people choose to do in their free time is something called “the fun-to-work ratio.” (All you have to know math-wise is that a ratio is like a fraction and it works like this: the overall ratio is a “big” number when the number on top is big and the number on the bottom is small. So 800/5 is a much bigger number than 2/9. In the case of the fun-to-work ratio, “fun” is on the top of the fraction and “work” is on the bottom. The bigger the overall number, the bigger the overall fun.)

This explains why something like “whitewater rafting” and “watching TV” are both referred to as “fun.” In the case of whitewater rafting, there’s a lot of work involved, but the thrills add a l ot of fun, so the fun-to-work ratio could be something like 30,000 (fun)/200 (work). Still a big overall number. In the case of TV, the overall number is big, but it’s not because the amount of fun is so high. It’s because the amount of work required is incredibly small. So the fun-to-work ratio for TV might be something like 2 (fun)/.05 (work). Still a big number overall.

Rethinking Reading Practice

With ItzaBitza and ItzaZoo, the designers not only made the drawing part super-fun with Living Ink, they also made the reading part easier with the universal word help and leveling-up that comes with grasping the meaning of a sentence to what the children draw. The result is a really big fun-to-work ratio, even for reluctant or beginning readers, because the fun part is high AND the work part is low enough to avoid frustration. So kids will choose it on their own when they want to have fun.

Got Books?

To get kids to also choose books in their free time, you have to make sure the fun-to-work ratio  is also high for books. The “work” in reading a regular book is going to be higher than videogames or TV – so you’ve got to increase the fun part of the ratio. And one way to do that is to help kids passionately love something and then tie to books to it. If books become a way for kids to spend time with something they’re crazy about, then the “fun” part of the ratio will outweigh the “work” part and kids will choose books – because, hey, they’re fun!

The World Ignites a Love of Reading

That’s why I tell parents of preschoolers they can’t separate getting kids interested in the world and getting them interested in books. Doing one will naturally increase the other, and you can start getting kids passionately interested in the world long before they’re ready to read. If you thought there’s nothing kids find more interesting than Barney or Mario, you’re wrong: the real world is way cooler, especially if you start helping kids admire it when they’re young. All you have to do is look for sparks of interest. Then do everything in your power to fan those sparks. Start as soon as you can to fill your day with Boom-di-yada book-talk. If a child gets interested in a bug on the porch, or a puppy next door, or drawing rockets on ItzaBitza, say things like “That is SO COOL! We have GOT to get some books about (bugs/puppies/rockets)!”

WE HAVE TECHNOLOGY!

This is also another perfect example of how technology doesn’t have to be the enemy of print. When your child asks something like “Do owls have eyelashes?” or “What sound do hippos make?” you can often look something up on-line, maybe find a video, and talk about it, right when their interest is hot. Use the Internet as an intermediate interest-builder that always ends with the “Awesome! We’ve GOT to get some books about that!” line. Then when you get to the real treasure trove – the library – get the librarian’s help to bring home a wealth of books (fiction and non-fiction) about owls or hippos or whatever. Your preschooler will see that books are a fantastic way to further explore what THEY are curious about, and what THEY find awesome about the world. The books, in turn, will further fuel their passions, making it even more fun to spend time with similar books as they get older, even when they have to do the solo work of reading.

#1 Tip for Children to be Book Lovers

So there you have it: my number-one tip to parents who want their preschoolers to grow up to be book lovers is “Start now to build passionate interests.” It’s a great way to give a high fun-to-work ratio to reading, and it will be your secret weapon to raising kids who love books. Boom-di-yada, Boom-di-yada!

        

We all remember the crusty octogenarian librarian of our youth, hunched over our upturned childish faces, peering down from ancient eyeglasses as she extolled the benefits of reading. As she droned on and on about some dude named Dewey Decimal and the dusty standardized tests of the distant future, your eight-year-old eyes drifted to the sun shining outside, and you prayed with all you might for boisterous recess and the moment you could get out of this musty book mausoleum.
Now however, you’re a parent, and you want to help your children enjoy reading, Luckily, there are benefits to reading beyond being the Scholastic pizza parties of your youth, from fun new reading games to increased self-esteem. So if you’re struggling to turn your wriggling youngster onto the joys of the written word, here are some awesome benefits of reading for a little incentive.

13) Reading helps you cope with stress and anxiety

Reading provides positive escapism from the real world, which can help detract from the stress of daily life. Remember, kids have stress too, and they need their own heroes, villains, and fantastical creatures to help them take their mind off the present. Young or old, there’s nothing like a good afternoon of peaceful page-turning to make you feel relaxed and at ease.

12) Reading helps boost vocabulary

Certainly you can learn vocabulary words through conversation, but reading is definitely a helpful supplement. Young readers will remember the classic moment when Ramona Quimby, literary heroine, walks up to her sister Beezus and comments on the “Dawnzer…which is glowing a lee light.” Her tragic butchering of “The dawn’s early light” of course sends Beezus into hysterics, and causes her little sister Ramona to become mortified with shame. Help your little reader master correct pronunciation and word mechanics through reading the words on a page, so they get the proper use of vocabulary and avoid embarrassing tongue-slips in the future.

11)Reading teaches tolerance

Reading is often one of the first fundamental building blocks that teach kids about a life unlike their own. In fact, those are often the books most popular with children! Whether they deal directly with stories of race and gender, like Huck Finn, or simply chronicle an unusual or zany lifestyle, like Eloise, who lived in a hotel, books teach kids to imagine a life beyond their own and embrace a more accepting, curious worldview.

10) Reading teaches morals

While other mediums such as songs and videos certainly can teach morals, many children’s book go above and beyond to meet this ideal in imaginative and impressive ways. For example, there are few morality tales as stark as the fairytales of youth, which teach against greed, laziness, talking to strangers and more. The beauty of these tales is that they are as lively and imaginative as they are moral, so they provide perfect pneumatic devices for playful young minds.

9) Reading helps children become engaged learners, rather than passive learners

Books force kids to use their imagination to paint the picture, rather than having it passively communicated to them through the picture on a television screen. This helps kids get the wheels turning in their minds, imagining scrappy heroines, honey-loving bears and mustache-twirling villains. Once you see those little foreheads scrunch, or watch your children stare dreamily into the distance while twirling their soup at dinner, you’ll know they’ve been bitten by the reading bug.

8 ) Is there anything more bonding than a bedtime story?

Reading together provides an unmatched magical experience between parent and child. After the bath and before the bed, you will always remember those cozy moments cuddled up together absorbed in a story. Whether you take turns reading together or you just read out loud, you will notice the change in your child as they go from sleepy reluctant listener to ramrod straight, suspicious book monitor who never fails to shout, “Mom, you skipped a page!” Oops, caught read-handed.

7) Reading is a good springboard for open conversation

Stories can be great conversation-starters. By casually asking your child how they felt about a particular character’s moral quagmire or quandary, you gain insight into your child’s character and circumstances, often more successfully than through direct probing. Use storytime as a catalyst to talk openly with your child, using magical tales to “break the spells” that are burdening your wee ones.

6) Reading enables you to become an expert Jeopardy contestant

Contrary to the blockbuster hit movie SlumDog Millionaire, you don’t have to be a slumdog from Mumbai to be a competent trivia player-although that is an awesome story. By cracking open a book, a child’s mind naturally absorbs all sorts of little trivia and information, and the impact of the story helps ‘set’ those facts in the mind, making them easier to remember later-like when there’s $20,000 riding on knowing that Myanmar was formerly Burma (thank Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning.) And in the mean time, your young’un can smugly regale their siblings with their random bits of knowledge, until such time as they can be sold, err entered, into trivia shows and pay you back for all those Harry Potter hardbacks.

5) Reading provides kids protection and autonomy

It’s an unfortunate fact that people aren’t as respectful to the personal space and polite barriers of children as they are with adults. As such kids are often the unfortunate victim of the yammering grandma on the bus or the well-meaning receptionist at the dentist office. By opening a book, kids finally have a way to politely but clearly shut the door of communication and disappear into their own private world at will. Reading gives them a way to filter communication with the same dignity and sense of personal choice adults enjoy.

4) Reading can get you a date

Not that you are ready for your little ones to find a mate, but when they do, wouldn’t it be cool if they met through mutual imaginary literary friends? Thanks to Penguin Dating http://penguin.match.com/matchuk/cp.aspx?cpp=en-uk/landing/penguin/index.html service, you can now get matched up via reading preferences, so you will never again date someone who prefers Brothers K the David James Duncan version when you are Brothers K Dostoevsky fan. This is of course the reading equivalent of irreconcilable differences. Rather than preparing your children for a future of smoky bars and awkward blind dates, set your little one up to find their future bookend by inspiring a voracious love of reading early on.

3) Indulge your child’s inner elephant

Most kids have a mind like a steel trap, displaying an eerie propensity for memorizing everything from commercial jingles to the exact time and date you accidentally let a four-letter word slip in the car. As such, the idea of being able to expand their memories will certainly appeal to them. This is where reading comes in. According to scientists http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200806_omag_reading
, reading is more neurobiologically demanding than processing images or speech. As you’re absorbing, say, this article, “parts of the brain that have evolved for other functions—such as vision, language, and associative learning—connect in a specific neural circuit for reading, which is very challenging,” says Ken Pugh, PhD, president and director of research of Haskins Laboratories, which is devoted to the science of language and affiliated with Yale. “A sentence is shorthand for a lot of information that must be inferred by the brain.” In general, your intelligence is called to action, as is greater concentration.” In a nutshell, reading takes a lot more brain-scrunching than your average image-processing, resulting in better memory and cognitive skills.
So to indulge your child’s inner elephant, be sure to make time for regular intervals of reading!

2) Reading can help you lose weight

I know what you are thinking. How can becoming a lazy latte-slurping bookworm possibly help you lose weight? Well according to a study http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1847340,00.html at Duke University, 31 overweight girls who read the book Lake Rescue http://www.amazon.com/Lake-Rescue-Beacon-Street-Girls/dp/0975851136, a motivational story with themes of a girl conquering her obesity problem, lost more weight than girls who read another book. This ties back to issues of self-esteem and confidence, which good reading skills consequently instill.
Certainly, if a child sits around reading and never goes out and exercises, they probably won’t lose weight. But if an inspiring book provides a tactful way to encourage your child on a very sensitive subject, get thee to a Barnes and Noble!

1)There’s more than one way to learn to spell “cat”

Best of all, there are so many new modern ways to learn to read, kids can find a way that feels “cool” and inspiring to them. If they fear burying their nose in a book at recess will cause them to lose playground cred, there are plenty of cool new online reading games http://SabiGames.com to help them learn to read in style. Best of all, many of these games incite the same sort of imagination, memory, and self-esteem boosting as the best children’s book. And unlike books, some of these reading games offer endless replay value, no dogeared pages needed. For a playful, paper-cut-free way to help your child learn to read, consider new reading games to help instill a lifelong love of reading in your child.

        

Dr. Sharp has been a key member of the team since we started our passionate journey back at Microsoft to rethink reading practice. Besides being a wonderful human being, she has a very deep knowledge and background on young children’s reading. Dr. Sharp is also an excellent author. We have learned so much from her that we wanted to share her thoughts with you. Dr. Sharp’s website is http://www.dianasharp.com.

Dear Dr. Sharp:

It makes sense that helping kids to love reading should be a priority in every child’s home. But what research supports it?

Great question. Doing research in this area isn’t quite as straightforward as, say, research on a new drug. You can’t take a group of kids, randomly assign half of them to swallow “reading love,” and then give the other kids a sugar pill and see what happens. Fortunately education researchers can be quite devious – I mean, clever – and I’m convinced the case has been made. Here are my top-ten favorite numbers from research, what they can tell us about kids and reading, and why everyone involved with ItzaBitza is so passionate about finding new ways to foster reading love.

#1

You can’t talk about the effects of reading without talking about vocabulary. And research shows that vocabulary is hands-down the most consistent #1 predictor of academic achievement.

50%

There are 50 percent more rare words in children’s books than in adult prime-time TV – or in the conversation of college graduates. Kids who spend more time with books spend more time with more words.

1,000 vs. 24 hours

Children in highly literate homes can hear well over 1,000 hours of read-aloud books in their first six years. Children from homes with infrequent storybook reading can come to first grade hearing less than 24 hours of reading at home in their first six years. When you think about what that means for vocabulary learning in particular and cognitive development in general, it’s plain scary. I loved hearing about a new effort in Toledo, Ohio, to assign individual volunteer readers to children living in low-literacy households.

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090615/NEWS16/906150323/0/NEWS08

If you live there, please sign up!

45 million versus 13 million

By the age of four, an average child in a professional family has heard 45 million words, and an average child in a welfare family has heard 13 million. That’s a difference of hearing 32 million words. The best – and maybe only – way to make up for that difference in experience with words is through becoming a voracious reader.

577

This is the number of Maryland fourth graders who were part of a study that looked at test scores on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Researchers found that low-privileged kids – those with low family incomes and low mother-education levels – who read a lot outscored significantly high-privileged kids who didn’t read a lot. This is great news! Those huge early differences in experiences with words can be overcome if kids love reading enough to read, read, read.

0

This is the number of other studies I’ve seen where researchers have discovered anything else that results in low-privileged kids outscoring high-privileged kids on national skills assessments. Zero. Zip. Nada. It may be out there, but I haven’t seen it. Reading is that powerful.

4

OK, this is a bit of a cheat, but “four” is the number of tests used in another one of my favorite studies. Fourth through sixth graders who read a lot significantly outscored non-avid readers (with the same decoding ability) on these four separate tests: word knowledge, verbal fluency, vocabulary, and general information. The two groups scored the same on tests of non-verbal intelligence, decoding, and spelling, which strongly suggests they had the same basic abilities to read – it was the amount of reading they did that mattered. As the researchers put it, “Reading makes you smarter.”

2 days vs. 1 year

By fifth grade, kids who read “a lot” in their own free time – that is, they’re in the 90^th percentile in terms of how much they read – are reading as much in two days as other fifth grade kids read in an entire year. Which group of kids do you want yours to be in?

10 to 50 million

The range in the number of words read by middle school students each year is from 100,000 for an unmotivated reader to somewhere between 10 and 50 million for the kids who read the most. Need I repeat, vocabulary is the #1 predictor of student achievement.

4 – 6

A highly respected group of researchers recently came out with the recommendation that kindergarten children should read or have read to them at least four to six books a day. No wonder!