What the Polls Say

Last summer Scholastic Books released an independent study that explained why kids stopped reading so much from about the age of eight and onward. There were three reasons why:

• Parents, seeing that there kids could now read for themselves, ceased reading aloud to them.
• Parents were not letting their kids catch them with a good book. In other words, they were not modeling good reading habits.
• Content availability, especially for young boys, decreased by age group. The older the kids became, the less the reading choices were.

The fixes are simple:

• Make reading aloud to the family something that never stops. We read aloud to our teens and they loved it.
• Let your kids see that you read for enjoyment.
• Look harder for better content. Much of it is coming from the small, independent presses that don't have as much money to advertise as the big publishers do. Go to http://www.heartlandreviews.com to get some ideas as to what is out there. We specialize in finding the good stuff.

What questions do you have?