Posts in category: Letters

A letter from the Executive Director, Dawn Miller

Children need us now more than ever. By us, I mean Read Aloud West Virginia, formally, of course – our classroom readers, our book distributions. But children also need us in general, their community.

Every week we hear from teachers. In addition to everything they struggle with this year, they ask how they can fit it all in. How can we get children to engage with books outside of the school day?

This is where the community comes in.

Read Aloud works on this a lot. Our community volunteers take time each week not only to show up and be present to read to children, but also to read ahead and practice and stay on the lookout for books their classes will enjoy. Our chapters come together to plan events and book distributions that give children, their families, and their schools opportunities to find and share books to love.

Every child needs this – people around them who believe, and show that they believe, that books are important. They need people who set the example in busy, distracted times for the brain and soul nourishing activity of reading.

Learning to read is often thought of as a set of skills, write Pam Allyn and Ernest Morrell in Every Child a Super Reader (Scholastic, 2016).

“And while it’s certainly true that children must learn to orchestrate a complex set of strategic actions that enable comprehension and decoding, it’s equally true that learning to read is a social-cultural event,” they write. “In other words, learning to read is more than simple skill building. Children also become readers when they are immersed in a community of readers, surrounded by rich book talk and animated demonstrations of reading, and provided with the social-emotional support that enables them to become members of the ‘literacy club’.”

When they say, “super readers,” they don’t mean just a test score. They talk about academic achievement, but also personal fulfillment, social well-being and civic engagement. Super readers enter a text with a purpose. They grow confident. They take risks, and they learn to discuss and expound on what they read.

As you see throughout this newsletter, Read Aloud is helping to fill needs exacerbated by shortened and interrupted school schedules. We are offering our classrooms virtual “Book Tastings,” where students can have rich book talk, and then choose more books to keep. We have been building Read Aloud Families, to help children to build their home libraries and to nurture family habits that will grow super readers.

On January 13, thanks to Scholastic, our chapters will come together for a virtual conference featuring Pam Allyn. Here, our volunteers will share some rich book talk of their own and carry knowledge and inspiration out to their communities.

Children, their families, and teachers respond to these efforts. They send pictures and thank-you’s. They tell us children are eager when their packages arrive. Children ask for the next book in a series and recommend books to their friends, cousins, and to us. With our steady example, they are growing into a community of readers.