School is a building which has four walls with tomorrow inside.
Lon Watters
In my book, Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six, I’ve endeavored to show parents why and how to play an active, hands-on role in helping their children become thriving readers.
But that’s not meant to suggest that parents should go it alone when it comes to turning their kids into readers. No one does. Every child’s road to reading is supported by a range of people, from the librarians who stock children’s books and host story time to the pediatricians who monitor developmental milestones and refer patients for additional assessment and care. Schools and teachers, in particular, are major contributors to reading development, when they are well-trained and well-supported in delivering high-quality instruction.
So part of the work of parenting for reading is being intentional about the formal learning spaces that we place our kids in. Fortunately, if you engage in the kind of everyday teaching and intentional conversation with kids around literacy that I advocate for in Reading for Our Lives, you’ll naturally acquire deep, first-hand knowledge of reading instruction. This will inform how you consider and select early childhood education centers and schools for your children.
When you have worked to build connection, vocabulary, and IQ through conversation; to bolster awareness of the sounds within words and the print in books and the environment; to teach letter names, shapes, and sounds; and to connect sounds to print and print to sounds, you can better recognize the education and childcare settings that will do the same. You’ll be able to spot the spaces and personnel that will help take your children’s reading to new heights.
This article will share a short list of items to look and listen for—and reflect upon—when you research and tour schools or childcare settings. However, I want to emphasize that you’ll best grasp all of these considerations if you’ve done the other talking, reading, and teaching work that I recommend. As Dr. Judson Brewer puts it, “Concepts don’t magically become wisdom with the wave of a wand. You actually have to do the work so the concepts translate into know-how through your own experience.”
It’s our everyday interactions with our kids, not studying reading instruction, that make us their best literacy advocates. What we do to engage our kids and what we learn about how they learn informs every other educational decision we make on their behalf.
How to Pick a Preschool or School That Boosts Literacy
Academic researchers look to things like teacher quality, curriculum, class size, environmental stimulation, and an array of other factors when assessing preschool quality. But I find that most parents typically have a much shorter list of selection criteria. Moms and dads focus on how close the options are to home or work, what the hours of operation are, and whether or not the places look clean and safe.
Only after those basic criteria are met (and if they have more than one viable option), do most then delve into the nuances of different curriculum and education philosophies, from Montessori and Reggio Emilia to Waldorf and HighScope.
When assessing options, I urge parents to tune into the sounds of the classroom and listen for the responsiveness, kindness, and knowledge on display. Just as children’s back-and-forth exchanges with their parents have a lasting impact on the kids’ brain development and academic prospects, dialogue and nurturing relationships with teachers matter greatly, too.
So, whether checking out in-home childcare, public-school pre-K programs, Head Start, or private preschool, here are a few things to look and listen for. All of these apply across the board when thinking about literacy in early learning spaces.
Back-and-Forth Conversation with Kids
Look for settings in which teachers have dynamic, nurturing verbal exchanges with each and every child. Just as parents provide critical language nutrition for their children, educators in infant, toddler, and preschool classrooms also spur vital nurturing, brain-building conversations.
So, when visiting classrooms or observing them via virtual tours, pay attention to how much teachers are talking with children; how well they are listening for kids’ responses, whether words, coos, or babbles; and whether or not each child in the space gets attention and conversation.
Class size, teacher inclinations and beliefs, and school culture can all affect word counts and conversational turns, and research has found vast disparities in how much talk different children within a space receive and give. Make sure your child is in a school where every child’s voice and participation is valued and encouraged.
Questions to Ponder
- Are teachers having nurturing one-on-one conversations with children, in addition to addressing small groups or the whole classroom?
- Are teachers pausing to listen for and respond to the children’s speech, whether words or babbles?
- What’s the ratio of direction/commands (e.g. sit down, be quiet) to conversation?
- Do the teachers speak to students with respect and value their expressions and classroom contributions?
Intentional Programming
Look for settings in which teachers can state what skills they intend to build, how they will nurture and assess them, and when and how they’ll communicate progress to families. The preliteracy and literacy skills that kids should be cultivating at different ages and stages vary widely, so be sure that the programs under consideration have a clear sense of what they’re teaching, why, and how.
For example, with infants, a teacher might share that they prioritize care, nurturing, and brain-building conversation—plus introduce books as objects of exploration, allowing babies to pat, chew, and turn the pages without expectation of great attention to the print or stories.
A teacher of toddlers might say they focus on giving children a variety of materials, letting them lead their own play, and encouraging them to create in their own way. The teacher might aim to provide a great deal of individual attention while also encouraging kids to try things on their own to see how far they get.
In a preschool program, you might expect more explicit discussion of the sounds within words and of letter names, shapes, and sounds, paving the way for formal instruction in phonics and spelling in kindergarten and beyond.
Beyond hearing the teachers’ intentions and method, also look for signs that they view parents as partners in educating children. Listen for assurances that they will keep you posted on what’s happening with your child throughout the year, so that you can continue to provide timely, responsive literacy support at home.
Questions to Ponder
- Do the teachers seem to enjoy their work and interactions with children?
- What curriculum or philosophy does the school follow? Is it accredited in the approach?
- What programs, degrees, certifications, or experience do the teachers bring to their positions?
- What blocks, toys, books, and other learning materials are on display? Do they seem to support the kind of learning the school says it emphasizes? How accessible are they to children?
A Joyful, Playful Environment
Look for settings in which kids are joyful, playful, active learners. When kids are deeply engaged in activities, and they have the freedom to play and explore the materials in their environment, good things will happen. During site visits, listen for the laughter and squeals of delight that characterize little kids’ engagement and discovery.
And, because we’re focused on reading, books and print should be an integral part of the fun of the learning environment. Look for books shelved in baskets, bins, and other spots that are visible and accessible to crawlers and walkers.
Watch to see if kids are given ample opportunity to handle books themselves. And observe how enthusiastic teachers are about discussing the stories, pointing out illustrations and print, asking questions of their little listeners, and fostering book love.
Questions to Ponder
- How happy and engaged do the children seem to be?
- Does the classroom or school foster a sense of community and connection?
- Are there age-appropriate materials to stimulate imagination, exploration, and discovery?
There is no perfect school, so it’s important to get clear about your highest priorities for your child’s learning environment and to listen to your gut feelings about the staff and spaces you visit. Tour schools with an open mind, open eyes, and open ears to find the options that will best serve your child and family.
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Every day, in a hundred small ways, our children ask, “Do you hear me? Do you see me? Do I matter?
L.R. Knost
For most of my life, I’ve held the strong opinion that people talk too much. Among the documents I found when thumbing through files of my old assignments from my twelve years as an Akron Public Schools student in Ohio is an ode to succinctness that I wrote for an English class. In the poem, I call on people to “get to the point,” “keep things simple,” and—presumably for the sake of the rhyme—to avoid “dangling participles.” As an adult, I live for days when I don’t take calls or meetings and spend a full day reveling in silence.
So, imagine my surprise as a quiet-craving parent to discover that all the “let them catch you reading” stuff I’d seen on blogs and in parenting magazines was not critical for raising a reader, but making lots of conversation with babies and toddlers was. If leading reading by example alone isn’t a thing, I learned, parents had best use our voices to proactively bring kids’ attention to print and to build the oral vocabulary they need to make sense of words on the page.
I’m not the only parent who missed the memo about sparking meaningful conversations with kids, beginning in infancy. Studies of kids’ early-language environments show enormous differences in both the quantity and quality of talk that kids engage in with their families. Parent talkativeness varies for all kinds of reasons, from our personalities, stress levels, and time demands to our beliefs about what babies understand and cultural norms about kids’ proper role in conversation with adults.
All of this matters because young children tend to follow their parents’ lead when it comes to how much they talk as they grow older. LENA, a national nonprofit that offers early-talk technology and data-driven early-language programs, compared the average daily vocalizations for kids who had parents with an Adult Word Count (AWC) in the highest versus lowest 20th percentile.
As you can see in the following graph of kids’ average daily vocalizations below from the LENA’s Natural Language Study, talkative parents tend to have talkative little ones and taciturn parents (caregivers who say little) have taciturn kids. And those differences in early language environments and early oral-language skills can have dramatic consequences for kids’ reading and learning outcomes years later.
This is the best illustration I’ve seen of the need for parents to say more to inspire kids to do the same. That is why I recommend working to build strong conversational rituals and routines into your family life as a key step to fuel your baby’s brain development and prepare them for reading. Experiment with different approaches to discover the ones that make you most able and motivated to converse more with the kids in your life.
And to the extroverts out there, you’re not off the hook. You should take heed as well, because parents of all stripes, from brusque to verbose, tend to overestimate how much we talk with our kids—and talking at kids isn’t the same as talking with them.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives
There’s evidence that initial memory and learning of voices and language begins before birth. By the third trimester of pregnancy, the sound of a mother’s voice may be transmitted from the amniotic fluid through the fetus’s skull and into the inner ear. So go ahead and speak up. Talk to your baby bump, because exposure to ambient language in the womb likely contributes to their phonetic perception.
Fun fact: Babies learn to perceive vowels before consonants, because “vowels are louder, longer in duration and carry salient prosodic information (melody, rhythm and stress).” One study of newborns in the United States and Sweden found evidence that at less than a day old, babies could distinguish between and reacted differently to vowel sounds from their first (familiar) language and another language. Why? Because they’d been hearing Mom’s voice and getting used to her vowel sounds for weeks prior.
Picture infants, just 20 hours old, lying on their backs in bassinets with sensor-fitted, computer-connected pacifiers in their mouths and padded headphones on their ears. That’s how the researchers tested their hypothesis!
Development from Birth to 6 Months
In the beginning, your newborn baby is speechless, except for a symphony of intermittent crying. They use the only sounds they know to tell you how they feel: whines of discomfort, low rumbles of hunger, and the soft moans of fatigue.
Your challenge is to tend to the immediate need—change the diaper, feed the baby, sing the lullaby—while also recognizing crying’s place in a broader language, learning, and literacy jour- ney. As speech and language therapist Nicola Lathey puts it, “crying is, in fact, nature’s way of enabling a baby to climb the language development ladder!” Waaaaaah!—those long vowel sounds are the seeds of words to come.
By the third month of life, infants add coos (comfort sounds in stress-free situations) to the mix, and win caregivers’ attention and loving responses. It’s easy to overlook the learning happen- ing amid the feeding, clothing, and washing that make up new-born life. But with practice, you can tune in, and you’ll be rewarded with new insights and discoveries. You’ll be able to notice the precious moments when cries become more speech-like in tone, as your little one gradually gains more control of their voice.
Of course, your level of talk and engagement affects your little one’s, so talk and sing at every opportunity. Mealtimes, bath times, and diaper changes are perfect points in the day to make conversation.
Beyond verbal communication, a lot of language development goes on through gestures, facial expressions, and even eye gaze. Infants pay a lot of attention to and learn from what they see, including what they see you looking at. Babies start following caregivers’ gaze between 2 and 4 months old—and evidence shows that they tend to learn more with gaze cues than without them.
Even though they won’t be able to read the words, include books from day one to get yourself into a routine of talking and reading to your baby. By 6 months old, little ones can enjoy hearing and physically exploring books. Board or vinyl books with limited text and unadorned illustrations provide the right-fit visual and tactile stimulation your infant needs. Books with poems and nursery rhymes, too, regardless of illustrations, make it easy to use your voice in a way that will please little ears.
Start sharing books with your baby and begin discovering what they like best. Every baby is different, and yes, they have preferences. It’s fun to see their reactions—reaching for the pages, pushing books away, even falling asleep. From the get-go, your baby is driving their own learning by following their interests and gathering information. Isn’t that incredible?
Although some books make it easier to support your child where they are now, don’t stress about picking the “perfect” first books. There are none. As literacy specialists Caroline J. Blakemore and Barbara Weston Ramirez put it, “Your choice of books is not as important as making the choice to read to your baby on a regular basis.” So choosing books you enjoy is powerful, too.
Judge books by their shortness and sweetness at this age, not their literary merits. You’re likely to hold your infant’s attention on a book for only a minute or two, so you might as well make it a fun, complete experience by picking a book that delivers language and visual interest fast. And here’s a pro tip that Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, shared with me: “Quit before they get restless. You end at the crest of the wave.”
Select Birth-to-6-Month Milestones & Targets
Oral Language
- Cries
- Coos
- Growls, squeals, blows raspberries, and other forms of vocal play
- Recognizes and responds to your voice
Book Behavior
- Looks at books
- Reaches for books
- Looks at print and images on pages
- Holds chin up to view pages when on tummy
- Prefers to look at higher-contrast images and human faces
Development from 6 to 12 Months
The language-learning journey continues in the latter half of the first year, through back-and-forth exchanges between you and your baby. By this age, babies may respond to simple requests like “come here,” imitate your speech, and shake their head no. They explore the world around them by gazing at and reaching for things, then passing the objects from hand to hand or hand to mouth.
They’re also getting more active in telling you what they think. They make sounds in response to the sounds they hear and to express pleasure or discontentment. They answer to their names, look where you point, and point at things themselves. One study found that when infants made eye contact with a caregiver while gesturing and vocalizing, the caregivers were more likely to respond. And how responsive caregivers were to infants’ gaze-coordinated vocalizations was the best predictor of expressive language development up to 2 years old.
And now, believe it or not, is prime time to make read-alouds interactive. One study found evidence that when moms directed more questions to their 10-month-olds while reading stories, their children had better expressive and receptive language skills at 18 months old than those whose mothers hadn’t engaged with shared books in this way. (Sorry, no dads were included in this research.)
The toddlers who’d been peppered with questions like What’s that? Where’s the doggie? Do you wanna turn the pages? Ready? during storytime as babies showed greater ability to understand what others said to them. They also showed a higher capacity to communicate their needs, thoughts, and ideas using words, phrases, and gestures. So there’s value in reading books and asking related questions, even before kids can answer fully.
Think of books as tools for connection at this age. Play peekaboo with them. Point and name things on their pages. And don’t be alarmed if little ones chew or throw them. That’s learning, too. Book sharing at this age can help kids gain fine motor skills and learn language, background knowledge, print concepts, new words, and more. Along the way, remember they’re
still babies and be attentive to their cues for whether to read more or take a break. Responsiveness is key.
Select 6-to-12-Month Milestones & Targets
Oral Language
- Babbles with long and short strings of consonant-vowel combinations e.g., bababababa
- Babbles may mirror the rising and falling intonation of caregiver questions
- Uses sounds and gestures to capture your attention
- Turns toward sounds
- Recognizes their own name
Book Behavior
- Grasps books using their thumbs
- Pats, strokes, scratches, and chews books
- Moves books from hand to hand
- Directs their eye gaze to large, bright, and/or high- contrast pictures in books
- Points to pictures in books
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Talking to babies is so vital to their brain development that it’s often called language nutrition. Yet parents of all stripes tend to overestimate how much we talk with our kids—and too often we talk at our tots instead of interacting with them responsively, which is best for their brain and language development.
Well, sometimes the secret to doing more of one thing is doing less of another. And such is the case with positive, responsive parent-child interactions and kids’ media use. If you want to talk more (and more dynamically) with your little one, then limiting the time they (and you) spend glued to a screen is a great place to start.
There was a time when parents only had to contend with television at home, but today smartphones and tablets make media accessible everywhere and every time. A 2023 study, relying on home recordings, found that average daily screen time for 3-year-olds was 172 minutes (2.86 hours) a day, almost triple the 1 hour per day maximum recommended by the Academy of American Pediatrics and the World Health Organization. And that difference amounts to a significant reduction in talk: 1,139 adult words, 843 child vocalizations, and 194 conversational turns lost per day, to be specific.
When to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time
Our words and care beat the unresponsive drone of the television or YouTube every time. Unlike older children, toddlers struggle to learn from video—even live video—without someone physically present alongside them to signal that the video content is useful and worth paying attention to. Only we (live, present humans) can provide the specific, tailored responses to kids’ utterances that they need to grow vocabulary and understanding.
For kids under two years old, the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines recommend very limited media use, and only when an adult is alongside the child to “co-view, talk, and teach.” An example would be when parent and child are video chatting with out-of-town grandparents. That is, media use for the youngest kids should be brief, interactive, and supervised, in order to benefit little ones. Many parents don’t want to hear this, because digital devices have become an integral part of our lives, but the research is clear: showing a baby videos on your phone is not educational.
Indeed, LENA data shows a negative correlation between hours of television and other electronic media detected in recordings and language ability in young children. And a longitudinal study of 2,441 Canadian children found that higher levels of screen time at 24 and 36 months old were associated with worse performance on developmental screenings at 36 and 60 months old, respectively.
Once kids reach preschool age, the time they spend on devices should continue to be in the company of an adult and limited to minutes, not hours, per day. The bright side is: once kids are 3 years old, there is evidence that they can gain valuable alphabetic knowledge from educational media, such as the public television shows Sesame Street and Super Why!, especially if a parent watches alongside them, discusses, and elaborates on the content. So there comes a time when co-viewing video content can create opportunities to talk, build vocabulary, and support kids’ development.
And you don’t have to commit to watching every episode of Daniel Tiger to fulfill your parental obligations. A rule of thumb is to watch a few episodes to gauge the quality and appropriateness of a show for your child and model how to engage with its content. Once you’ve set the tone and shown them how media works, then you can slip away from future episodes to tackle other tasks or take a break.
Preschooler media use is particularly prevalent in households with multiple children, because parents use smartphones or tablets to calm or separate bickering siblings. But researchers warn that the quick fix has lasting consequences: “the negative impact brought by excessive screen time will actually increase the burden for parents in later life.” That’s because each additional hour of screen-time exposure is associated with kids’ increased risk for emotional, behavioral, social, and attentional problems down the line.
How to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time
One strategy that works for many families is drawing hard boundaries around screen use, such as having device-free dinners; setting curfews after which all devices are docked, charging, and unavailable for use; or creating screen-free rooms or zones at home. Thousands of families have signed on for Screen-Free Saturdays, a nonprofit initiative that promotes unplugging, recharging, and disconnecting from the incessant marketing and manipulations of media and technology companies. You could give it a try and make it an event by powering down devices at sundown on Friday, getting a great night’s rest, and fueling a day of family fun and conversation on Saturday.
Parents’ own use of media also adversely affects family talk. Numerous studies have found that when parents are on their phones, they’re less engaged with and responsive to kids—verbally and nonverbally—sometimes even leading to injury when kids engage in risky bids for attention.
Now, I’m not saying we have to give up Netflix and devote our full attention to our children every waking second. But let’s be honest about where our focus is, what that focus means, and how we might take more opportunities to unplug from devices and tune into our kids. A survey of two thousand parents of school-aged children revealed:
- 69 percent of the parents felt “addicted” to their phones.
- 62 percent admitted to spending too much time on their cell phones when they were with their kids.
- 50 percent had been asked by their child to put their phone away.
Knowing better and doing better are two different things. Breaking our bad phone habits often requires serious intervention—mindfulness, that is. Jon Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” Practically speaking, mindfulness is the ability to create mental and emotional space between a stimulus and our response. It’s cultivating the awareness, self-regulation, and perspective to consciously choose our words and actions (or silence and inaction) in the moment.
In the past decade numerous studies have investigated mindful parenting and found evidence that it can reduce caregiver stress and coparenting disagreements. Some of the same techniques that have helped parents step out of autopilot and respond to kids more skillfully can also serve to help us set aside our phones and converse more in person. Mindfulness-based approaches have helped people battling phone addictions in other contexts. In a pilot study of phone-obsessed university students, mindfulness-based training was associated with a reduction in the students’ cravings for their smartphones and in their smartphone use time.
An easy way for parents to curb device use is to make a mindfulness practice out of the phone itself. We can follow the example of Marta Brzosko of the Self-Awareness Blog, who “created room for more conscious decision-making” around her phone by taking ten mindful breaths whenever the urge to reach for it emerged.
Similarly, clinical psychologist Mitch Abblett recommends that after we reach for our phones we pause and sit with our devices in hand. Let our thumbs hover over the screen. Take a full, deep breath into the belly and notice whatever thoughts, physical sensations, or emotions arise. Get curious about it all, note whatever feelings come up, and continue to return to attending to the breath.
“We simply (and yet with great difficulty) need to learn to hold our technology more lightly—with more awareness,” Abblett explained in a Mindful magazine article. “Consider making your phone itself a cue for waking up instead of checking out.”
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings.
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Humans have been reading at least since the late fourth millennium BCE, when pictographic script was first etched into clay tablets with the original stylus, a writing tool sharp enough to leave an impression. And explicit reading instruction in English—directly teaching the links between letters and sounds—has been going on since the sixteenth century.
But it’s just been in the last several decades that we’ve had the benefit of rigorous experiments, massive data sets, and targeted technologies to illuminate how kids learn to read: the earliest roots of reading in children’s lives and parents’ critical role in sustaining them. Perhaps this new knowledge can push us from literacy for the elite to literacy for all.
There are crucial prereading and early-reading subject areas that parents are especially well-equipped to teach kids, with love and lightness, in daily life. They include oral language, speech-sound awareness, and letter-knowledge skills that research shows are critically important for later reading skills. They also include the simple work of familiarizing kids with books and how print works, as well as the more advanced work of matching letters to sounds (and sounds to letters).
Are there other things that parents can and should do to nurture literacy? Absolutely. But these are meaningful, life-altering, often-overlooked areas that are well within our capacity to start addressing (and, yes, teaching) today.
Although abilities like these tend to show up in preschool and kindergarten screenings, they apply to a much wider age span—I’d say from birth to 116, given the remarkable story of a woman named Mary Walker, born in 1848.
Walker’s dream of literacy, beautifully told in Rita Lorraine Hubbard’s picture book The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read, was deferred through slavery and sharecropping, through the lives of two husbands and three sons, and the administrations of twenty-six presidents of the United States. She learned at last at 116 years old, and read until her death at age 121 on December 1, 1969.
“She studied the alphabet until her eyes watered,” Hubbard wrote. “She memorized the sounds each letter made and practiced writing her name so many times that her fingers cramped… She studied and studied, until books and pages and letters and words swirled in her head while she slept. One fine day Mary’s hard work paid off. She could read!”
Literacy is still deferred for too long for too many, for lack of a strong foundation. I know a high school literacy coach whose job is to give teachers strategies to help teenagers who can’t read make sense of the science, math, social studies, and other course content in class. Imagine being expected to learn advanced content with no understanding of the printed information in textbooks and classroom materials.
When she can, the coach pulls students out of class to tutor them in the basics of letter-sound associations that they never mastered in elementary or middle school. It’s not a service she expected to provide high schoolers, but one they desperately need. And who will be there to help them when they struggle after they graduate—or drop out?
Would-be readers of any age must master the basics. There are areas of study that just cannot be skipped.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Think back over your last few months of spending. What were the big-ticket items or experiences that you purchased for your child? If you were to judge yourself on where you invested dollars on their behalf, what would those expenses say about your priorities?
Sports, travel, and clothing topped my list of spending for my daughter this summer. She moved to a new soccer team, which required buying all-new everything: socks, shorts, four different jerseys, a backpack, outer gear for all weather, and the list goes on and on. As luck would have it, the one thing the team didn’t require—new footwear—made its way into our shopping cart anyway, because her old cleats no longer fit.
I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars, far more than I spent on education during the same time frame. Do I value soccer over education? No. Does my spending look like it? Yes.
While there’s not an exact correlation between what we spend and what we value, I do believe that our visible spending sends kids strong messages about our priorities. How we spend says more than we intend.
Reading on the Road
So to tip the scales a bit in reading’s favor, I decided to put a lit-rich trip into the mix. If we can travel to Missouri and Arizona for soccer, I thought, why not go to our nation’s capital for reading? The Planet Word Museum and the National Book Festival had long topped my list of literary destinations to check out, so I brought my mom and my daughter along to make a weekend of it.
The Planet Word Museum was well worth the time and travel. Educator and philanthropist Ann Friedman’s founding vision for transforming the historic building has been beautifully realized, down to minute details like language symbols embedded in flooring and elevator interiors that look like library shelves. Every inch of the space exudes intention and enthusiasm for the human experience of language.
Most remarkable for a museum dedicated to words, it resists the urge to overwhelm visitors with print. It offers immersive, sensory, memorable experiences with language, using movement, light, and sound to capture visitors’ attention. It leaves space for guests to create our own meaning from what we consume, versus having it spoon-fed to us through the long placard descriptions typical of museums.
Everything at Planet Word is engaging, but here are a few of our favorites to give you a taste of the experience.
Global Voices
In your excitement to enter the museum, don’t miss the courtyard’s gorgeous, interactive art. Experiential and evocative, a towering aluminum sculpture, called Speaking Willow by visual artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, commands the space. Ivy creeps up its trunk and bell-shaped LED lights and speakers dangle from its branches.
When visitors pass under, it murmurs words from 364 different languages, representing the languages spoken by more than 99% of the world’s people. The speech —general statements about the various languages and cultures represented—isn’t meant to be parsed. Rather, let the words wash over you and inspire your sense of wonder at the richness, diversity, and interconnectedness of human communication.
Iconic Idioms
The Joking Around exhibit gives visitors a shot at shouting out iconic idioms—if you can take a visual hint from the provided props. We caught on to some pretty quickly, like “in a pickle” and “two peas in a pod,” but others left us stumped… to this day. Go ahead, have at these word puzzles. Then visit Planet Word for more. This light-hearted, interactive exhibit gets kids (and adults) thinking about the playfulness and creativity of figurative language.
The Word Wall of All Word Walls
Kids may be familiar with classroom word walls, filled with high-frequency words or lesson-specific vocab. This is not that. Planet Word’s 22-foot-tall talking word wall tells the story of the English language, through video and illuminated words. Visitors play a role, too, using microphones to interact with the exhibit and help shape the narrative.
Native Speakers
The Spoken World exhibit showcases iPads arrayed around a globe of lights. The screens offer mini-lessons in languages from Icelandic to Wolof, which highlight the diversity of world languages for us, as well as the universality of communicating culture and community. We loved the chance to practice words in unfamiliar tongues and ponder the heritage and identities of the speakers, as well as our own.
Gifts of Gab
I love a good gift shop, and Present Perfect at Planet Word had it all—bookish socks, pins, puzzles, games, and even dishes digging into tricky words like they’re, their, and there. There were books for word nerds of all ages, from Spelling Bee savant Zaila Avant-Garde’s Words of Wonder from Z to A picture book to Joe Gillard’s The Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting. If you’re on the hunt for a baby shower gift, I recommend this adorable onesie. It pairs perfectly with my book, Reading for Our Lives.
We tapped out after two hours at the museum, which means there’s still much, much more to explore. On our next visit, we’ll be sure to dine at Immigrant Food, tackle a word-puzzle case in Lexicon Lane, and dig into the “I’m Sold” advertising exhibit. And I’m sure we’ll pick up a few more SAT words in the photo booth, sponsored by the College Board.
Long story, short. We loved it. Five stars. We’re sold on the idea that Planet Word truly is “the museum where language comes alive.”
Summer break arrives, and with it, the familiar quest to keep kids reading during their time off from school. Many parents optimistically enroll children in summer reading programs, hoping it helps kids foster a love for books and learning. And to sweeten the pot, libraries tout rewards like coupons and gift certificates to entice kids to hit milestones—say, a certain number of books or minutes read.
As a child who loved to read, I know the appeal personally. I recall carrying a stack of books taller than myself to the checkout desk at my local library in preparation for their summer reading program. I’d scavenge the library, meticulously looking through each section, hoping to find interesting books that were short enough to finish in time to receive a prize.
But now I wonder: What comes first, the love of reading or the enticement of a reward? Do rewards really help kids fall in love with books, or are they just icing on the cake for kids who already enjoy reading?
Let’s look at the arguments for and against summer reading rewards programs—and the story of one library that ditched them in favor of building up kids’ basic reading skills in a county where low literacy is endemic.
The Case for Summer Reading Rewards
Conventional wisdom says incentives get kids into the library, encourage them to seek out books they enjoy, and get them reading more. A whopping 97% of public libraries nationwide offer reward-based reading programs, doling out everything from stickers, stuffed animals, and temporary tattoos to free books, coupons, and tablets. As one librarian noted, kids may come for the prizes but then “leave reading for their own sake.”
Surveys of and interviews with middle schoolers who participated in summer reading programs and their parents suggest that the effectiveness of prizes is a mixed bag: a combination of what’s called “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation.
Essentially, “intrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something for the sense of satisfaction you get from doing it. In this case, that would be reading for the love of reading. “Extrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something because you’ll get some kind of compensation or outside approval for doing it. Here, that would be reading to get a reward.
Popular thinking is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful, but research suggests that people aren’t driven completely by intrinsic motivation or completely by extrinsic motivation, but rather by a complex mix.
Indeed, the surveys showed that some kids who already enjoyed reading appreciated program perks as nice add-on incentives and said they read more than they might have otherwise to meet program targets. Others felt the content of the prize itself was less compelling than the sense of accomplishment they gained from doing the reading required to earn it.
Most of the parents surveyed felt that their kids read more, improved their reading skills, and gained reading confidence as a result of the summer reading rewards programs.
The Case for Ditching Reading Rewards
But not everyone is convinced that such summer rewards programs meaningfully fuel a love for reading—or even that administering them is a good use of librarians’ limited time.
Veteran children’s librarian Anne Kissinger believes libraries should focus on directly helping kids gain reading skills (which many lack, according to the numbers) instead of celebrating pages turned over the summer. In fact, she successfully lobbied for her library system to abandon summer rewards programs altogether.
For years, she says librarians at the Wauwatosa Public Library where she worked spent most summer days stamping coupons for participants in their reading rewards program. In summer 2017 alone, the library system distributed 3,000 rewards.
But at the height of this apparent success of the summer reading program, she worried that the library had evolved into a “clearinghouse” for promotional goods instead of a bastion of reading skill and interest. “They’re not reading for their own enjoyment,” she observed of kids participating. “They’re reading to fill in our logs or meet our requirements.”
With her branch located in a county where 25% of adults read at or below the lowest literacy level, peddling extrinsic motivation at that scale felt to her like shirking responsibility. Faced with the choice of sticking to the status quo or championing a deeper commitment to reading, she advocated to free librarians’ time up from stamping coupons and direct it toward better equipping parents to help their kids learn to read in the first place.
Reading specialist and Wauwatosa library patron Christine Reinders noticed the change in what the library offered physically—and culturally. It had always been a place where parents could find material to read to their children, but now it was becoming a space where parents could support their kids to read to themselves. For example, it was offering more books with simple words that kids can sound out along with more support for parents teaching their children to read.
“‘[Wauwatosa] is a really special place, because they had a library and a children’s librarian who recognized this need” to cultivate basic literacy, Reinders said. “The library was filled with all these wonderful books, but many were not accessible because kids were just learning to read. Now, we have those beginning readers to help them establish that solid foundation to become proficient readers and writers.”
Lessons for Parents From the Reading Rewards Debate
Ultimately, rewards may get some kids in the library and reading more in the short term, but parents would do well to attend to the longer term and intrinsic motivation, too. That’s the kind of motivation that stems from kids learning to read with enough skill, fluency, and understanding to enjoy it.
And libraries like Wauwatosa’s can be great partners in that pursuit when they offer resources for parents about fostering reading skills, as well as simple early reading material for kids.
After all, reading motivation is no simple black-and-white matter. Once we can read, we do it for many reasons: interest in the story, curiosity about the topic, the satisfaction of learning or getting to “the end,” the joy of personal choice, the prospect of a prize. We’re driven by a messy mix of reasons and inspirations. Parents and others hoping to encourage kids to read, or read more, may be best served by leveraging the gamut of motivations.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of my turn as The Richmond Christmas Mother, a community fundraising campaign I led that raised more than $325,000 to make the holidays a little brighter for Central Virginia families in need. It was the 80th anniversary of the Christmas Mother Fund, and I was the youngest woman—and first black woman—to helm the effort. I quipped at the time that for the last several years the committee had selected Christmas Grandmothers. (Daphne Maxwell Reid, the original Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, followed me in the role in 2018.)
In retrospect, that campaign signaled a turning point—not just for the fund, but for me personally. It marked a pivotal early step in my personal transformation from community volunteer and book cheerleader to early literacy leader and parent engagement pro. The campaign added “child literacy advocate” to my name in news headlines for the first time, and it stuck. In the years since, I’ve added new titles like “author” and “parent educator” to the mix, as I’ve sharpened my understanding of what it takes to really move the needle on reading achievement.
The Christmas Mother Fund historically directed most of its support to the Salvation Army’s Christmas assistance programs. But during my tenure, we expanded its impact by launching a competitive grant project in partnership with the Community Foundation. We interpreted “Christmas” broadly to extend all the way from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and aimed to reach into 80 different pockets of the community through local organizations big and small. This allowed us to support incredible work, such as providing home-cooked meals to homebound seniors and disabled people and bringing joy to kids battling cancer.
While I did the usual hustling—placing calls, talking with media, meeting with local businesses, and presenting to civic organizations—I also put my own spin on the campaign. I donated copies of Each Kindness and other Jacquelyn Woodson books to local children at schools and child care centers. By the season’s end, I’d distributed more than 1,000 books. My Christmas Parade float, too, reflected my passion for literacy: I decked out a trolley in homage to Ezra Jack Keats’s classic picture book The Snowy Day. The marvel of art, craft, and engineering on wheels was brought to life by a dedicated team of volunteers. (Yes, we hung countless hand-cut snowflakes from the trolley windows to ensure a white Christmas.) All in the hopes of inspiring reading, encouraging parents to read to their children, and getting families to give books for Christmas instead of only toys.
Along the Dominion Energy Christmas Parade route, I tossed stuffed dolls of Peter, the main character of The Snowy Day, into the crowd. (Throwing board books into the air felt too risky.) I was joined by author friends Meg Medina, Gigi Amateau, Robin Farmer, and Stacy Hawkins Adams. At the time, I thought I might follow them into publishing fiction. Instead, I walked a different path, writing for parents and encouraging families to raise readers.
This wasn’t my first foray into advocacy. Previously, I’d launched a campaign to raise funds and awareness for Friends Association for Children, an early childhood development center that I adored and that I later highlighted in the conclusion of Reading for Our Lives. But my Christmas mother campaign gave me a platform to articulate what I now see as my core conviction: if we want to address society’s most entrenched challenges, we need to invest in children’s early education and literacy.
Looking back at a 2014 interview with Cheryl Miller on Virginia This Morning, I’m reminded of how long and deeply I’ve held this belief. All those years ago I said, “I’m a really big advocate for early childhood education programs and literacy programs for our children. I think as a community, we can invest more in children earlier and prevent a lot of the problems that many social-service organizations are grappling with as the children age.”
Some things never change! Ten years in the game and I say some version of this daily. Only now, I have the privilege of taking stages nationwide to spread the message. In 2024 alone, I addressed thousands of early childhood educators, K-12 teachers, librarians, interventionists, and parent educators in states as far-flung as Wisconsin, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, and Idaho.
The Richmond Christmas Mother campaign wasn’t just a fundraiser. It was a turning point, a launchpad, and a testament to the power of a community coming together to create change. It’s been 10 years, but the lessons I learned and the momentum it sparked continue to shape the work I do today.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Literacy First, an Austin-based high-impact tutoring program, kicked off its 30th anniversary celebrations in a meaningful way: with a virtual book club discussion of my book, Reading for Our Lives.
Rather than just retrospective fanfare, the organization chose to ponder its mission by engaging staff, board members, district partners, and the broader community in a thoughtful dialogue about work outside of its current scope. The topic: engaging with parents of kids before they arrive in school. This choice underscores Literacy First’s commitment to continuous learning and using collaboration to drive change.
Reading for Our Lives Book Discussion
It was a pleasure to join the conversation with readers who had already engaged with the book. Their questions showed real curiosity and thought, diving into the nuances of my writing process: Why that title? How did I decide which histories and voices to feature? We also explored practical strategies for supporting young readers—tools that anyone, whether a parent, teacher, or community member, could use.
The discussion took on some of today’s most pressing literacy topics, including how to embrace multilingualism as an asset to literacy development. Another topic we addressed was the role organizations like Literacy First, along with partners such as BookSpring and school districts, can play in achieving literacy for all children.
Participants were eager to dig into early literacy milestones, reflecting on the need for schools to raise expectations around specific literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. A recurring theme emerged: the challenge of communicating to parents and educators that just good enough isn’t good enough—early literacy skills matter deeply, and they set the foundation for future success.
We also tackled practical concerns. How can preschools recognize the importance of systematic instruction? What strategies work for families with neurodiverse children or late talkers who aren’t ready to jump into conversations but still want to build literacy skills? And finally, I was asked a fun yet intriguing question: Have you thought about starting a podcast? (My answer: Try me in 2026!)
Literacy First: The Gold Standard of Reading Tutors
For three decades, Literacy First has set the bar for reading intervention through its effective approach, inclusivity, and measurable impact. Serving students from kindergarten through second grade in both English and Spanish, the program will support 2,000 children this year—adding to the more than 30,000 students it has helped since its founding.
I’ve followed Literacy First since 2017, and I can attest that it’s the real deal. During my time in Austin, I had the opportunity to observe its tutor training sessions, attend a tutor swearing-in ceremony, visit schools to see tutors in action, and celebrate the program’s successes. Making it possible for well-trained tutors to intensively support kids’s reading development in English or Spanish for 30 minutes a day 5 days a week is as impactful as it is rare.
Two key lessons stood out during my Literacy First observations. First, focus and intensity matter. To be effective, educators need to engage with research, identify the exact skills students need, and deliver targeted instruction at a dosage high enough to move the needle. Second, tracking progress is essential. Literacy First not only holds itself accountable to results, but it also makes sure its efforts translate into measurable improvements for students.
A Reading Mission That Matters
I’ve seen firsthand how transformative qualified tutors can be. There’s simply no substitute for a focused, intentional effort to teach more people how to teach reading. Sadly, in too many settings, reading tutoring falls short—not due to lack of effort, but because of a lack of expertise and funding.
Children deserve better. They need programs like Literacy First that combine research-backed methods with a commitment to excellence and accountability.
After 30 years of remarkable impact, Literacy First remains a beacon of hope for students, families, and educators. Despite its age, I think it’s just getting started.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Newsflash:
All those beautiful children’s books you’ve been collecting?
They won’t help your child learn to read or love it unless you actually read them—regularly. Sharing books with kids gives them indelible experiences and positive emotions around reading that make them want to read on their own. Yet many parents focus on what they plan to read to their kids and neglect the urgent matter of assigning time to actually do it.
And it’s no wonder. Endless book reviews and recommendations (mine included!) feed our picture book cravings and tout books for every theme, holiday, or moment in your child’s life. The coverage journalists and influencers give to the content of books grows our libraries and Amazon wish lists, far outpacing reports on how to build strong family reading habits.
There’s a lot to keep us parents from reading to our kids daily—from a wavering motivation to read and competing priorities to busyness, fatigue, and more. Not to mention our kids’ moods, attention span, age, and interest level.
But I’m here to tell you that looking beyond bedtime and identifying multiple, recurring opportunities to read with your child will pay off big-time. Building these routines not only fosters better vocabulary and language skills for your little one, but also more quality time, bonding, and well-being for the whole family.
The Anatomy of Family Reading Culture
Let’s face it: Reading stories is important, but building reading culture is transformative. Culture requires depth and frequency, so families that weave multiple strands of reading into the fabric of their daily lives reap the greatest impact.
Each family’s reading culture is the product of a unique mix of resources, relationships, and rituals. Factors include the books and other reading material you have in your home, how you show up to share them, and how frequently you do so. All of these can nurture your kids’ reading attention, interest, and motivation.
A family living in a book desert, for example, might not have much reading material, but could read fewer texts more frequently and with great warmth and get good results nonetheless. By the same token, a family with more resources might fill a child’s room with kid-lit but never take the time to read or discuss the books together—coming up short on relationships and rituals. Luckily, regardless of your starting point, there are always opportunities to ramp up your book collection, book talk, and reading routines.
Of all these elements of reading culture, rituals are especially powerful, because they increase the dosage of the other two: reading material and relationships. Reading together daily—preferably multiple times a day—boosts your child’s exposure to the vocabulary and knowledge in a wide range of books, plus it increases your engagement and conversation. The benefits of consistency are so pronounced that I believe that when you choose to read to your child matters as much as what you choose to read.
Designing Reading Rituals
Ready to establish some reading rituals to ensure that the books you’ve been collecting get read and discussed? Here’s how:
Step One: Choose Your Moments
As I learned from behavior scientist BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method, timing is critical. Fogg recommends consciously tethering new habits you want to build to your most deeply entrenched existing routines. This makes it easier to remember and implement the new habits. That’s part of why bedtime story reading is such a common ritual for families, with 87% of more than 2,000 parents surveyed by Scholastic saying their read-alouds occurred at bedtime or naptime. Kids go to sleep (or at least get in bed) every night, so it’s less of a stretch to add reading into the mix of tucking them in.
Bedtime is far from the only consistent, daily event that you can anchor reading to, though. Pay attention to your time with your child and make a list of the daily habits, routines, and points of interaction you share. Do you wake them up? Prepare meals? Eat together? Drive them to daycare or other activities? List out all the recurring moments. Think of things you do before noon, afternoon, and in the evening, right before they go to bed, etc.
Step Two: Brainstorm Behaviors
With your existing patterns in mind, look for opportunities to make reading tag alongside those activities.
Can you open up a book of five-minute stories after you wake your little one? Turn on an audiobook after you fasten your seat belt in the car? Point out words and letters on signs, or comment on your morning reading, as you drive through your neighborhood?
The goal is to weave reading and literacy into your day via small actions, making new behaviors as inevitable as brushing your teeth or eating dinner. Think of “tiny” as something that can be done in 30 seconds or less or in 5 reps or less, e.g. reading a page of a book (not reading for an hour) or pointing out a word or letter (not a dozen).
This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim high, just that you’re focused on starting small and (importantly!) celebrating sooner.
Step Three: Celebrate Your Successes
As you try out new habits, remember to celebrate your wins. Parents don’t get enough credit, so give yourself a mental high-five every time you successfully incorporate reading into a new part of your day. You could also celebrate out loud and bring your little one in on the action. Give them a high five along with saying “we did it!” to share your enthusiasm with them and put an exclamation mark on the experience.
In the Tiny Habits method, celebrations are truly the key to making the new behaviors repeatable. When you give yourself a pat on the back, pump your fist, or engage in the celebration of your choice immediately after accomplishing the new habit, you reinforce that behavior. Your celebration’s positive vibes trigger a dopamine surge, wiring your brain to link your habit with those feel-good moments.
If, on the other hand, you follow the accomplishment by mentally beating yourself up for not reading more, or sooner, or better, you do the opposite—discourage yourself. So be your own cheerleader to best instill positive habits.
As Fogg puts it in the Tiny Habits book: “There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.”
That’s great news! It means that we can form new habits quickly, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not how many times you repeat a habit that makes it stick. It’s how positive your emotions connected to the habit are— and that’s something we can consciously impact.
Step Four: Tweak and Repeat
Start by experimenting with a few new reading habits at once, so you can compare and contrast results. Don’t feel pressured to nail the perfect routine immediately. Try different times and methods of incorporating reading and see what sticks. This is a design process. Observe what works, adapt when needed, and keep refining your approach.
Through it all, stay tuned in to your child. If they’re squirmy before meals, distracted during playtime, or tired at night, don’t push it—try other times and places. And if the books you’ve picked aren’t grabbing their attention, switch things up until you find some they love.
Remember, the most compelling picture book in the world won’t build a lasting reading habit on its own. You reading it regularly to your child will.
And a proven way to make that happen is the kind of purposeful behavior design described above, bolstered by positive emotions. So skip obsessing over finding the perfect books and focus on weaving reading throughout your busy days instead.