As longtime friends and passionate advocates for literacy, Susan Marx and Barbara Kasok have a habit of finishing one another’s sentences – in conversation and now, quite literally, in print. The duo recently teamed up to write Help Me Get Ready to Read: The Practical Guide to Reading Aloud to Children During Their First Five Years (CreateSpace, 2010).

 

The book provides parents, grandparents, daycare providers and preschool teachers with specific strategies to keep children engaged in stories and introduce early literacy concepts in the process. The authors also offer more than 250 recommendations of books to read to infants, toddlers and preschoolers, along with suggested prompts for parents to try while reading together with their children.

 

The goal of the book is not to teach children to read before kindergarten. Rather, the two women say they tapped into their own experiences as teachers, mothers and grandmothers, along with proven research, to show parents how to raise children who are “reading-ready.” They advise starting with rhyming board books in infancy and continuing with more sophisticated comprehension activities for 5-year-olds.

 

Marx says most parents “get it,” when it comes to the importance of reading aloud to their children as early as infancy. “What most people don’t get is we can accomplish so much more if we read effectively,” she says.

 

For example, take the story Sheep in a Jeep, by Nancy Shaw (Houghton, 1988). Before reading the book, a parent can ask a child to point to the sheep and the jeep. They can ask who is driving the jeep. As the parent reads aloud, they can pause to talk about action words. See the sheep leap. Show me how you leap. The jeep is in a heap so the sheep weep. Show me how you weep like a sheep. The parent can then offer specific praise: “Good job weeping like a sheep.” All these exercises introduce children to vocabulary.

 

To encourage comprehension, a parent might ask about what animals help the jeep. For phonological awareness, a child could be invited to clap at the mention of the rhyming words – beep, sheep, jeep and steep. To recognize letters and their sounds, a parent could invite children to say the sound they hear first in “jeep” and point to the lowercase “j.”

 

These exercises, say Marx and Kasok, are not meant to be used every time a parent and child cuddle up together with a book. That would be exhausting. But they want parents to understand how the simple act of asking a few questions and listening for the answers can deepen a child’s connection to books and establish a lifelong love of reading.

 

“Reading aloud should always be enjoyable. I can’t stress that enough,” says Kasok. “It never should be a lesson. The message should always be, ‘I want to read this book to you because I care about you, I respect you and I value our time together.’”

 

In their book, Marx and Kasok tackle some of the more common questions they hear from parents during their literacy workshops. Edited versions of their answers appear below.

 

 

Is it okay to read the same book over and over again?

 

Yes. As children become familiar with a book, it becomes one they like because they can join in with words and phrases, and they know what happens in the story. Always stay with the book that engages your child.

 

 

What kind of books would be good to read to my baby?

 

Try to select books with simple repetitive text – words or phrases that are repeated over and over again. Also, look for books with such features as rhyming words, black and white illustrations or photographs and large colorful illustrations.

 

 

What do I do if a child gets restless while I’m reading aloud?

 

Read-aloud times should be stress-free, so be sure to have realistic expectations for your child. If a child needs to move around or has a short attention span, adjust your reading time. If your child seems to be losing interest, stop reading, leave in a bookmark and tell the child that you will finish reading the book at another time. Or, instead of reading the book, you may do a picture walk using the pictures of the book to tell what happens using your own words.

 

But every night, still try to read a little, even if it’s one minute. If you do it gently and in an encouraging way, you will be engaging kids in books and learning.

 

 

What should I do when a child wants to try to read rather than listen to the book?

 

Many 3- to 4-year-olds love to have an audience to show off what they can do. They like to pretend that they are reading, so definitely encourage your child to do so.

 

 

What do I do when a child wants to read books only on one topic, such as dinosaurs?

 

Don’t discourage a child’s interest in a topic that you know is a good one. For many little ones, dinosaurs are fun, scary, interesting and spark imaginations. Go to your local library to find more dinosaur books, but also find a book or two on related topics, such as rainforest animals or farm animals.

 

 

What should I do when children do not show an interest in books?

 

In our age of technology, many parents find that television, video games and electronic gadgets compete with books for children’s attention. One suggestion is to encourage children to select their own books rather than choosing ones that you think will be of interest to them. Another suggestion is to list titles of books you read together on a reading chart. Encourage children to place stickers next to the book titles after you read them. This provides children with something tangible that can be a source of pride for them.

 

Susan Flynn is associate editor of Boston Parents Paper, a sister publication of Bay Area Parent.

 

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Recommended Reads

 

Among the recommended read-aloud books from Susan Marx and Barbara Kasok, authors of Help Me Get Ready to Read, are:

 

For Infants and Toddlers

 

• Big Fat Hen, by Keith Baker, Harcourt, 1994.
• Each Peach Pear Plum, by Janet and Alan Ahlberg, Viking, 1999.
• Good Night, Gorilla, by Peggy Rathmann, Putnam, 2003.
• Hooray for Fish!, by Lucy Cousins, Candlewick, 2005.
• Peek-a-Who?, by Nina Laden, Chronicle, 2000.
• Where to Sleep, by Kandy Radzinski, Sleeping Bear, 2009.
• Whose Chick Are You?, by Nancy Tafuri, Greenwillow, 2007.

 

For 3- to 5-Year-Olds

 

• At the Beach, by Anne and Harlow Rockwell, Simon & Schuster, 1987.
• Blue Goose, by Nancy Tafuri, Simon & Schuster, 2008.
• Hattie and the Fox, by Mem Fox, illustrated by Patricia Mullins, Macmillan, 1986.
• The Little Rabbit Who Liked to Say Moo, by Jonathan Allen, Boxer, 2008.
• My Garden, by Kevin Henkes, Greenwillow, 2010.
• The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, Viking, 1962.
• Turtle’s Penguin Day, by Valeri Gorbachev, Knopf, 2008.

 

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To order a copy of the book, check out

www.readaloudguide.com or find authors Susan Marx and Barbara Kasok on Facebook at “Help Me Get Ready to Read.”