Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound. https://t.co/FEmCrdQ392
told my 4 year old he can’t have ice cream cake after dinner if he doesn’t EAT his dinner and he came up to me immediately and said “can you give me a hug so I don’t cry?” and when I bent down for a hug he whispered “don’t ever say that to me ever again”
One house rule turned a normal 8 year old into a kid reading at a sixth grade level, about three grades ahead of where he should be. The rule: you can stay up as late as you want, as long as you're reading a book. He thinks he's getting away with something. He's actually doing the one thing that separates strong readers from struggling ones.
A child who reads for about 20 minutes a day takes in roughly 1.8 million words in a year. A child who reads less than a minute a day takes in 8,000. Same school, same teacher, more than 200 times as many words, sentences, and ideas. A 1988 study in Reading Research Quarterly followed 155 fifth graders and found that out of everything they did after school, time spent reading books was the clearest sign of how much their reading would improve.
And the head start sticks. The Annie E. Casey Foundation tracked nearly 4,000 kids and found that the ones not reading at grade level by the end of third grade were four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma. Third grade is the turning point. That's when school stops teaching kids to read and starts expecting them to read to learn everything else.
Reading for fun does something even parents can't outwork. A British study that followed 6,000 children found that how much they read for pleasure was more closely tied to their progress in vocabulary and math by age 16 than how educated their own parents were.
The rule works because the kid is the one choosing. When a child picks the book and reads because he wants to, his motivation goes up and stays up. Roughly 9 in 10 kids say their favorite books are the ones they chose themselves. This parent turned reading into the thing you get away with after dark, the opposite of a chore. The kid feels like a tiny outlaw. He's quietly building a bigger vocabulary and a reading habit, both getting stronger every year.
He thinks he won because he's still awake. The research says his parent won bigger. Win/win, confirmed.