Preschool Demographics 3: Parents and Reading.

I said I was going to talk about the words next, but something else occurs, first:

To get kids to read, parents are told to provide provide preschoolers with plenty of books and other reading materials that they can explore at their leisure, in any down time. Further, they are told that reading to their child from this collection, excitedly, helps communicate that reading is fun. . In short, kids want to do what parents tell them is fun to do. If parents ‘ooo’ and ‘ahhh’ over their vegetables, there is the potential preschool kids will want to eat those, first. I can speak to this from my own experience.

Reading helps preschoolers identify mechanics like capital letters and small letters, and sentence elements like periods and commas, and also basic sentence structure. Parents can also help kids learn specific words by sight. But this secondary step should not take the place of the first.

By way of illustrating this, I remember an open house with my children’s second grade teacher. There she emphasized to a class of parents, sitting in too-small chairs, that we need to read to and with our kids, as an avenue to helping them get these sight words. One of the busier mothers commented that she did not have time for this in a structured fashion, but that she did help identify words on the street, like STOP on a stop sign, or words on street signs. I stifled back the urge to call out “That’s behavior you’re supposed to teach to a pre schooler, or first grader, M’am. This is second grade. Read him a book.”

Anyway, for preschoolers, illustrated storybooks are most relevant because the child can follow along with the story as the parent reads, Parents help foster reading comprehension by asking questions about the story and about the pictures. This is picked up in later books as the art of reading and writing for context.

One of the products I worked on at Great Source Education Group was called the Readers Handbook, and another was called Reading Advantage. Both dissected the reading process, helping students to break down critical reading strategies and tools to use in reading (such as imagining what would happen next in fiction). They also had reading tools and organizers, and an outline that distinguished different types of text. It was amazing as an adult, to realize that at some point I was taught what was fiction versus non-fiction, what the structure was for a newspaper article versus a magazine feature article, etc. that’s all stuff that’s so ingrained, I never thought to question how it got to be so. It just always was—because I was a reader from an early age. These book, intended for grades 4 through 12, presents teachers with tools for helping students who are not early readers develop the skills to understand what reading was all about, dissecting what was essentially (for me at least) a transparent process.

But the goal for the demographic at hand is to teach them this through the first course, that is by teaching them to read and to love reading. And, again, the best path to this is through their parents. And the best way to get the parents to communicate that reading s fun, is by making it so in the books they read to their kids.

I heard a report the other morning that Reading Rainbow, a show that’s been on the air for 26 years, and is the third-longest children’s programming on PBS (Behind Sesame Street and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood) is ending, because the former sponsors, PBS or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or any station, will not front the several thousands of dollars to renew the broadcast rights. The reasoning behind this, in my own filtered nutshell, due to a shift in public policy and governmental focus from shows that talk about a love of reading to shows that focus on the basics of phonics and spelling—the “building blocks” of reading.

It occurs to me this leaves an inspirational, aspirational vacuum. Kids will learn to read, because schools require it. But my experience has been that you need first to teach kids to learn to read, then read to learn, and lastly love to read. The first and second are the basics that are being tackled in school, but the third is being left as a big hole, which will need to be filled.