http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/earlyshow/leisure/books/main591785.shtml
January 6, 2004 21:12:27
Lions
Help Kids Read
Review:
"The Between the Lions Book for Parents"
(CBS) The
Emmy award winning children's program "Between the Lions," which is focused on
reading, has been touted as a sequel to "
The
popular PBS show is branching out with a new book, "The Between the Lions Book for Parents."
Christopher
Cerf, the co-creator of "Between the Lions," along with the patriarch of the
puppet lion family, Theo Lion, are scheduled to stop by The
Early Show on Wednesday to discuss the new book.
Inspired
by the series, "The Between the Lions Book for Parents"
is a lively guide for parents to help children learn to read as well as a guide
to obstacles they may encounter along the way.
The
book is devised to equip parents of children ages 4 to 7 years old with all the
tools their children need to help them succeed at and enjoy reading. The book
includes:
*
An explanation drawn from the latest research on the process of learning
to read.
*
An overview of the so-called "reading wars" that addresses whole language
and phonics arguments.
*
An age-by-age guide -- complete with developmental milestones.
*
A wide array of activities and "red flags" to be on the watch for.
*
A full discussion of the unique role parents play in their children's
literacy.
"Between
the Lions" is an award-winning PBS television series that premiered in April
2000. It's designed to foster the literacy skills of its viewers, while
playfully demonstrating the joys of reading.
Read
an excerpt from "The Between the Lions Book for
Parents":
Chapter
One
What
Is Reading?
As
parents, we come face-to-face every day with mystery. How does that tiny baby
figure out,without being told, how to roll over, sit
up, crawl, and walk? Where did your preschooler learn all those words and how to
put them together? How can your third-grader program the VCR when you can't? And
who left those cookie crumbs all over the floor?
We
can't help you with the cookie crumbs -- although, let's face it, you probably
don't need Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out -- but we can offer some
useful information, guidance, and encouragement about one of the great mysteries
of childhood: what is reading, and how is my kid ever going to learn to do it?
Especially in our society, where so much of a person's success seems to depend
on his ability to do well in school, parents can feel anxious about whether
their children have what it takes to learn to read.
So
here's the first thing you need to know: just about every child, given the right
support and instruction, will learn to read. And, for struggling readers,
there's a lot you can do to help.
Just
by picking up this book, you've already demonstrated that you're doing the thing
that matters most. You care about your child's reading, and you want to help him
learn. Your loving support and guidance, more than anything else, will motivate
your child and help him find his way toward being a reader.
And
because you're a reader yourself -- you're reading right now, aren't you? --
you're probably also already doing the one thing that
researchers universally emphasize as a key to children's reading: you're reading
to your child. That one simple act, more than anything else you do, builds your child's understanding of books, his grasp of
language, and his desire to read for himself. Give him those building blocks,
and you've already given him much of what he needs to become a reader.
Of
course, he'll still have plenty to learn about the details of the process: how
letters represent sounds, how sounds go together to make words, how words
combine to form sentences, and how sentences add up to a meaningful whole. But
those details are just that: details.
They're
also small, specific skills that build on and reinforce each other, and that
your child will put together one by one to solve the larger puzzle: discovering
meaning. That's the point, always, of reading: to make a connection between the
words on the page and what they mean -- and, by doing so, to make a deeper
connection between the reader and the world.
And
by setting your child in your lap with a book, you're helping him learn how to
connect.
You're
giving him the big picture -- a warm and welcoming context into which he can fit
all the bits of knowledge about books and reading that
he'll
assemble in his years at school.
What
Happens When You Read?
If
you're the kind of person who likes to know the fine points of how things work,
check out the box "
This
is trickier than it might seem. Researchers have learned a lot in the past few
decades about how reading works, but they're still figuring out some of the
details. That's because reading is something a skilled reader does swiftly,
silently, and internally. Even if you try to observe the process in yourself,
it's almost impossible to see just how you do it. For this reason, many people
assumed for a long time that skilled readers don't sound words out as they read
and that they probably skip words, just focusing on the important ones.
In
fact, all of those assumptions have now been proved to be more or less wrong.
Believe it or not, skilled readers look at almost every letter of every word,
and their brains attend to the sound as well as the appearance of what they
read. We think we read with our eyes, and of course our eyes are part of the
process. But what's even more important is the language-processing ability of
our brains.
In
the same way, when your child is learning to read, he assembles what he learns
about letters to build his ability to read words, then
puts his knowledge of words together to figure out how to comprehend sentences
and the text as a whole. In both processes, knowledge is the goal, but it cannot
exist without the smooth assembly of its tiniest parts
...
The
foregoing is excerpted from "The Between the Lions Book for Parents" by Linda K.
Rath and Louise Kennedy. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used
or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers,
İMMIV,
CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.