Reading Is Good

It’s story time in your class. Today’s book is Andrew’s Loose Tooth and you’ve just reached the point where little Andrew bites an apple and lets out a painful scream before begging his parents to help pull out his tooth, and you are faced with a choice. You can read it in a normal voice you know, just, plain — or you can ham it up, really let out a full barrelled yelp and sob the words, “Mommy, mommy please do something about this tooth! It hurts so much I can’t even eat my breakfast!”

Which do you choose?

If you’re the reserved type, you probably go for the first — the quiet, ‘read-the-words’ type of approach. And that’s okay. But while there is nothing inherently wrong with reading to children in this way, I would argue that the second option, the modesty-to-the-wolves, let-down-your-hair approach, can have a far reaching positive impact on children’s early literacy development.

In fact, there are three solid reasons why throwing propriety out the window and getting outright SILLY while reading to children will make a huge difference in their ability to read and write.

1. Silly is fun, and fun is engaging.
2. Silly is light, light is relaxed, relaxed is more successful.
3. Silly is expressive, expressive is fluent, and fluent IS reading.

Let’s explore each in more detail.

Silly Is Fun and Fun is Engaging.

If there’s one thing I see over and over as students move from the relatively free-wheeling early days of kindergarten to the more structured and academic half of the year and the beginning of first grade, it’s the way their attitude towards reading and writing changes. Early in kindergarten, when we ask nothing more of them than to experiment with written language, they are thrilled at the prospect. They can’t wait to draw and write, to explore the pictures in books and play with the bits of language in them that they can recognize and tackle.

But as the year wears on and we start shoving an education down their throats, when we add structure to their writing tasks and ask them to learn reading strategies and skills, they drag their feet. In the midst of all the new and, frankly, difficult things we expect them to master, it’s no wonder that much of the exploration and enjoyment starts to bleed out of the task.

So one of our primary jobs, teacher and parent alike, is to remind students that reading is FUN. While learning all the difficult tricks needed to do it well may be a chore, reading is nonetheless an enjoyable, relaxing, and desirable endeavor.

The best way to do this is to give young students positive vicarious reading experiences, simply put: times when they see the enjoyable benefits of reading without having to do any of the work. AKA, the read-aloud.

It’s key to remember that this is the only way your child will keep his sights on what it is that he’s working toward. Only if reading with you is fun, will your child believe that reading by himself will, one day, be fun, too.

And I can’t think of a better way to convey that fun and enjoyable aspect of children’s literature than throwing yourself into the story and being as silly as you possibly can. Quack out the duck’s words in Duck On A Bike. Let out hearty ‘Arrs’ and ‘Ahoys’ while enjoying How I Became A Pirate. Sob as Andrew bites the apple. Give every character a voice. Read with enthusiasm. Laugh, roll, tickle, get up and dance if it strikes you as appropriate. Just make sure that it is, above all else, FUN.

Silly is light, light is relaxed, relaxed is more successful.

Reading is fun, rewarding, and enlightening. Indeed, for many of us, reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, learning to read is one of the most difficult things young children are asked to do during their school careers. Combine this difficulty of the task with the enormous pressure put on kids to master it and master it quickly, and it’s no wonder many kids show little interest in reading.

Experiences that show kids the funner, lighter side of reading are invaluable countermeasures. Every time we show kids that reading is a form of entertainment, we lower the tension that surrounds it and give them a chance to enjoy what is otherwise a chore. With this lighter, more relaxed experience, the stress drops and kids are far more likely to succeed in their own reading.

Silly is expressive, expressive is fluent, and fluent IS reading.

The heart and soul of reading, the most critical skill for readers to acquire in order to do it well, is what educators call fluency. Simply put, fluency is an individual’s ability to read smoothly, quickly and with expression. While the experts differ in their exact definitions and in how much weight each part of fluent reading is given, they are unanimous in one thing: if you can’t read fluently, you can?t read effectively.

A major part of fluent reading is technical stuff: sight vocabulary, decoding skills, etc. But another big chunk of it is an ability to read the words with expression. To give life to language. To take the written word and convert it back into the inflection-filled spoken language it originally was.

Text itself holds very few clues about how to read with expression. Instead, kids achieve expressive reading when they understand the connection between their experience with spoken language and words on a page.

By reading with expression, indeed, by being overly expressive, we model this connection for our children. We show them by example how to convert plain written words into vivid oral language.

Things To Do

There are obvious benefits to being silly while reading with your child. Here are some specific things you can do to make reading fun, relaxed, and model fluent reading to your child.

1. Use voices. Children’s literature lends itself particularly well to using voices. Accents, animal voices, old lady voices, whatever. If you use voices while you read, you make it fun and model an important lesson.
2. Make noises. The illustrations in picture books provide opportunities to embellish the story by adding sound effects. Don’t hold back. More goofy is more fun for your child.
3. Act it out. Wave your arms around, roll about. Physical comedy goes over really well with kids.
4. Finally, check out the ‘Read-Aloud Tips’ section of each book review on this site for specific advice on turning reading into an engaging and fun experience.

If we want our children to grow to become lifelong readers who get joy and enrichment out of reading books, we must set the example now, while they’re young, even if it means embarrasing ourselves by being silly. So don’t hold back. A silly parent can create an especially literate child.