All District Reads is built upon the belief that encouraging families to read aloud together can enhance family engagement with schools, support children’s language and comprehension skills, and help children develop a love of reading. Specifically, ADR’s programs are based upon ideas from Jim Trelease’s classic book, The Read-Aloud Handbook.
“The more you read, the better you get, the better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it,” wrote Trelease in the Handbook. This principle underlies ADR’s programs to help children develop the love of reading. In his book, Trelease also said, “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire,” which ties in with ADR’s desire to “light literacy fires” in homes across southeastern Virginia.
Numerous research studies support the importance of both reading aloud and reading for pleasure. Consider the following:
- A 2024 analysis of more than 20 research studies on reading for pleasure, including large-scale international studies, suggests a strong relationship between reading achievement and enjoyment of reading. Furthermore, those strengths seem to extend to academic achievement in general. Access the full article from the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies here.
- According to Scholastic’s Kids & Family Reading Report, fewer parents are reading aloud to children than in the past. However, most parents understand the importance of reading aloud, and most parents and children alike agree that reading aloud represents a special time spent together. Read further details here.
- A study published in 2023 in Psychological Medicine found a strong link between reading for pleasure at a young age and positive performance in adolescence relating to a variety of areas, including school academic achievement. A summary appears here on the University of Cambridge website.
These studies and many others reinforce the importance of both reading aloud with children and encouraging children to read for pleasure. As noted in a 1995 study by reading researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley, children from impoverished homes may enter school having heard as many as 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. All District Reads helps level the playing field by exposing ALL elementary children in participating school divisions to the vocabulary of engaging children’s books.
This all ties in with another of Jim Trelease’s observations: “Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head—by reading.” Learn more about The Read-Aloud Handbook, Eighth Edition here.