Parents: How to help
The habits associated with productive reading can be nurtured at home as well as at school, says Donald Deshler, director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas. The center's model of literacy instruction is now used by some 400,000 educators--including those at Discovery Middle School in Orlando, whose program drew a visit last month by Laura Bush.
What can parents do to promote an enjoyment of reading in an older child?
You can be a good model--turn the TV off and have a conversation about what you've read, engage the family in a conversation about the ideas. You'll want to fill your home with materials around their interests and at their difficulty level--catalogs, magazines, books. There's a great metric called the "Lexile" that allows us to judge the difficulty level of a book or a magazine [ www.lexile.com ]. If you know your child is reading at the 1300 Lexile level--generally, schools have students' Lexile levels--you can go to the library and find appropriate books.
If a teenager's grades are slipping, what might be the signs that he has a problem with the text?
Perhaps he reads magazines but seems to shy away from more difficult material. He makes excuses for not reading the text: It's boring, or the teacher doesn't really use it. Or he reads a couple of paragraphs and can't give a brief explanation of what he just read.
How involved should parents be?
One of the toughest things a parent can do is try to be a teacher; better to be supportive and help kids problem-solve. But you can suggest that it's important to focus on the critical vocabulary words--they might be in boldface, or in a list at the beginning of the chapter--and that before reading the chapter, it's a good idea to survey it. Begin with the questions at the end of the chapter, so you understand what the author thinks is important. Skim before you start reading in detail, then read subheadings for a sense of how the chapter is divided up. Then, periodically stop and ask yourself, What have I learned? The student is doing two things: focusing on elements of the text that potentially deliver more meaning and actively interacting with the text. He's not just passing his eyeballs over the chapter.
Any other advice?
It's important for parents to understand that success in learning has a lot of emotional parts to it. If you fail in learning, you start to fear the learning process. So there can be more going on than a problem with comprehension. -Anne McGrath
This story appears in the February 28, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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