Media Macaroni

A while back, I mentioned Jim Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook and how it warranted its own blog post (or ten). I’ve finally written such a post, but I did it over at the Hooked on Phonics blog. I could write about the book 20 times and still not say everything there is to say. For instance, one of my favorite tidbits from the book is this: An international reading study conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement surveyed 9-year-olds ands 14-year-olds in 32 countries. Which nation had the top reading scores, you ask? Finland. The U.S. came in second for 9-year-olds, but then dropped to a tie for 8th when looking at 14-year-olds. 

This demonstrates that American children begin reading on a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature. 

The significance of Finland’s high reading scores is that Finnish children don’t start formal reading instruction until age 7 – two years later than children in the U.S. I think about this little nugget of information every time I feel any kind of pressure to get my preschooler to start reading.

Read more on The Read-Aloud Handbook here, and please also check out my other recent posts:

• Five Easy Tips for Reading Aloud
• The Top 100 Picture Books of All Time (which is follow up to the incredible survey done by A Fuse #8 Production previously mentioned on Media Macaroni)

I’m heading to BookExpo America tomorrow and hope to be reporting back with lots of literary goodies for your enjoyment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.