D.E.A.R. Follow Up

I hope everyone is having a good Drop-Everything-And-Read Day. Back at the end of February, I posted about D.E.A.R. and invited everyone to participate in a challenge of their choosing. If you'd like to report back on how you're doing, or should that be how you've done...this is the post to do it!

D.E.A.R. is an important day because it's a day of recognizing what every day should be like. A day that says that reading is an important part of life. "National D.E.A.R. Day is a special reading celebration to remind and encourage families to make reading together on a daily basis a family priority." Reading. Families. Togetherness. Books. It really doesn't get any better than this. (The following list is I believe from Jim Trelease. I'm 85% sure that's the book I got it from. But I checked out a few at a time. And I'm not completely completely sure.)

Reasons to Read Aloud to Your Child

• Conditions the child to associate reading with pleasure, an association that is necessary in order to maintain reading as a lifelong activity
• Contributes to background knowledge for all other subject areas, including science, history, geography, math, and social studies
• Provides the child with a reading role model
• Creates empathy toward other people, because literature values humanity and celebrates the human spirit and potential, offering insight into different lifestyles while recognizing universality
• Increases a child's vocabulary and grammar, and has the potential to improve writing skills
• Improves a child's probability of staying in school
• Improves future probability of employment and higher quality of life
• Increase life span by virtue of correlated education, employment, and higher quality of life
• Lowers probability of imprisonment
• Improves problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that are fundamental and transferable to all other areas of learning
• Offers information
• Offers laughter and entertainment and an alternative to television
• Improves attention span
• Stimulates the imagination
• Nurtures emotional development and improves self esteem
• Reading skills are accrued skills that are bound to improve over time..a countdown to academic success

Here are some books that YOU might find helpful

How To Get Your Child to Love Reading by Esme Raji Codell
The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever by Mem Fox