Reading Out Loud

Last week, I attended the Association of Independent School Librarians (AISL) conference in Nashville, Tenn. One of the headmasters, who welcomed us to his school, read from an article in the New York Times about a father who read to his daughter every night for over 3,000 nights. 

Eventually she could read on her own, but her father kept reading out loud to her for at least 10 minutes a day. When she reached the fourth grade, they started keeping track of their nightly reading. Even after 100 days straight, they kept reading. After 1,000 days, they decided to see if they could keep up their streak of nightly read-alouds. Despite school activities, high school plays, etc, the two ended their streak only when the daughter left to go to college ... after 3,218 straight nights!

From the hundreds of books he read to her, the father helped to create fluency, vocabulary, decoding experience, and all those essential skills necessary to read. But perhaps more importantly, he also created a shared language (quotes from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare) and a strong bond. Most of us parents only read to our children until they are fluent readers themselves, but after reading this article I wish I had persevered much longer.

The article referenced above is “A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page” by Michael Winerip, New York Times, Sunday 3/21/2010. Click here to read it.