This book is filled with an abundance of excellent information regarding reading aloud to children of every age group.

However, I didn't have the same level of fondness for this one as I did for "Honey For A child's Heart". The main reason being that it seemed to focus more on statistics rather than the genuine love for reading.

Nonetheless, there are still numerous valuable points to consider within its pages.

Moreover, the second half of the book presents a remarkable annotated list of recommended books, neatly sorted by age.

There are many different titles compared to those included in "HCACH", and each comes with its own unique details.

This makes it a useful resource for parents and educators alike who are looking for new and interesting books to share with children.

Overall, while it may not be my absolute favorite, this book still has a lot to offer in terms of providing insights and suggestions for promoting the joy of reading aloud to kids.

This book is truly a game changer!

I have always been aware that it is "good" to read to your kids, but I had no idea just how beneficial it could be!

The author of this book shares a wealth of old-school wisdom. For example, he suggests requiring your kids to read, turning off the TV, and emphasizes that reading to your kids provides a great connection.

However, I don't agree with every point the author makes. Some of his statements, such as "any reading is good reading," Oprah's book club is a wonderful thing, and the claim that the Harry Potter books lowered crime and teen pregnancies (!?), seem a bit far-fetched to me.

Despite these differences in opinion, by sifting through the author's enthusiasm and looking beyond the points I don't agree with, I can see that this is really a great book. It offers many valuable insights and practical tips for parents who want to encourage their kids to read and build a love for books.

This is truly worth purchasing just for the treasury of books at the end alone! I have a great passion for learning about how crucial reading is for my kids. It truly provides me with motivation! This is exactly the kind of book I love.

“If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.” This statement really makes one think.

If you are similar to me, you often find yourself rushing to get the kids into bed so that you can enjoy some peace and quiet. However, allowing them to read and even reading to them for just a few extra minutes can have a profound and lasting impact on their lives. It helps to foster a love for learning, expand their vocabulary, and enhance their imagination. These are all essential skills that will serve them well in the future. So, the next time you are in a hurry, remember the importance of reading and take a few extra minutes to share this wonderful experience with your kids.

Great! This book truly had an impact on me, causing me to downgrade my rating for "How to Raise a Reader".

Now, don't get me wrong, both books could potentially be great in their own ways. However, the evidence and the voice presented in this one were far more compelling to me.

It offers valuable insights and practical advice that can be beneficial for both parents and teachers alike.

In contrast, the other book seemed to be aimed at a very particular slice of privileged parents, which limited its appeal and applicability.

This book, on the other hand, has a broader reach and can be a useful resource for a wider range of people involved in the education and upbringing of children.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for its engaging content and practical suggestions.

The book can be summarized in the following way:

Read out loud to your children at every age, as frequently as possible. Be an enthusiastic reader yourself, and your children will thrive.

The author presented some arguments that seemed overly simplistic.

What I adored most about this book is that it motivated me to read more to my child and to truly have a passion for reading to him, which I believe was the author's intention. I would highly recommend this book to any parent, regardless of their age!

It is a relatively straightforward book that inspires kindness and goodness.

I discovered this at the bottom of a bag of clothes that was being handed over to my son.

Undoubtedly, it originated from my sister-in-law, who is both a mother of three and an elementary school teacher.

I am extremely delighted that it has come into my possession. This book serves as an outstanding resource for parents, teachers, and librarians alike.

It elaborates on the significance of reading aloud to children and the numerous positive impacts it entails. The book also delves into silent reading, TV watching, and other reading-related matters.

I firmly believe that every parent, teacher, and librarian would stand to gain from perusing this.

The second half of the book is a reading treasury - simply a list of suggestions for books that are excellent for reading aloud (as opposed to those that are more suitable for silent reading).

These books are labeled with the recommended grade level for the listeners and a concise description.

Overall, this book is a valuable asset that offers valuable insights and practical suggestions for promoting reading among children.

See the 3rd edition for my full review. Here I will just comment on the new and changed material.

Differences between 3rd and 6th Editions:

First, I want to note that I read the bulk of the text out of the 3rd edition because my library had this edition. But, after reading the chapter on television, I searched for a newer edition and got it through inter-library loan. There were big differences between the two editions, but the general message was still the same. The 6th edition had been completely reformatted. Not only was a new font employed and some photographs added to spice it up, but the headings were all turned into questions. I didn't like the heading change, or maybe it was that it seemed the text was generally pared back (about 60 pages shorter despite the room new photos and charts take up in the newer edition). I believe these changes were made to make the text more parent friendly, but as a teacher as well as a parent, I didn't need those changes. Having question headings like a What to Expect parenting book wasn't a plus for me. A change that I did enjoy was to the treasury of read aloud texts at the end. The slight formatting changes made it much easier to read the titles and ages at a glance.

As far as content changes, there were a few fields: technology, titles, and studies. Since I did not reread all of the 6th edition, I didn't see many of the newer references to studies, but I specifically sought out the new titles and technology info. The third edition was published in 1995, and the 6th in 2006. This is a huge difference in terms of new children's titles and technology changes. The treasury of read aloud texts was completely revamped to include many titles from the 10 years between the editions. But, the technology section's revisions were the most needed. In the 3rd edition, there is no mention of the internet and video games are only mentioned in passing. The technology chapter is about television almost exclusively, which makes sense for 1995. But, in 2011, television is not the lone detractor for reading time. Now, the games, social sites, and streaming video the internet offers pose a stronger threat, in my mind, than television alone. If Trelease is ever to publish a 7th edition, he needs to spend even more time on this topic. But, as it is now, the 6th edition does a much better job addressing the technology that interferes with reading. The 6th edition brings many new statistics about television viewing to the plate. (However, I'm not sure that I believe that there is a connection between young TV viewing and ADHD without some rational). Trelease also offers ideas on controlling TV that are more modern, but nothing as modern as the parental controls built into digital TV boxes.

The sixth edition had a chapter dedicated to three new phenomenon: Oprah's book club, Harry Potter, and the internet. I found the ideas about Oprah and Harry most interesting. He looked at both of these cultural reading rockets and explained why they were so successful, versus the interventions that are often forced in the classroom. The four lessons we've learned from Oprah's book club are:

1. To instill the love of reading, you must be an avid reader yourself. However, most teachers don't read any more than the rest of the population.

2. The idea of a book club works better than a class.

3. There should be more discussion of books, and less writing about them. Talks about books should be open (again, more like a club than a class).

4. Put these all together and you get the final lesson: A love of reading is more caught from others, than taught.

So, what did Harry Potter teach us? The six lessons we've learned from Pottermania are:

1. Not all series are created equal. Harry had children highly motivated to read books nine times as long as lite youth series like Goosebumps.

2. "Children want page turners, just like grown-ups do."

3. When meeting censorship in the name of religion, remember "Christ came to take away our sings, not our minds."

4. There is no reason to fear series books as trash. Even the ones with less quality than Harry Potter have their place.

5. Much research has shown that successful and avid readers enjoyed series books as children, too.

6. Use movies to promote sequels or other books by the same author. (It was the marketing for the first Harry Potter movie that got both my husband and I to start the series. After getting the last three books on publication day and reading most of the series aloud to our infant daughter, we are currently planning on celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary by seeing the last movie installment).

Lastly, five lessons from the internet:

1. Giving someone a computer doesn't make them more responsible. Kids will instant message in class and go to all manner of inappropriate sites. Who are we kidding? Adults do to on their jobs! I know for a fact that many of the teachers, myself included, I know would use their computers for non-work related purposes during meetings and master's courses. A computer doesn't make someone instantly engaged in the subject and thus immune to the fun allure of the internet.

2. The internet and a good library should work together. When you need an in-depth, reliable answer, you need more than Wikipedia.

3. Reading from a computer screen (at least in 2006) was slower than paper due to the quality of the image. Also, the embellishments possible on a computer can hide lack of content or credibility.

4. Email does not help writing skills.

5. Time on the computer isn't any better than time in front of the TV when that time is detracting from reading, socializing, or exercising.

Another interesting change between the 3rd and 6th editions had to do with commercial reading programs. The 3rd edition discusses Hooked on Phonics pretty exclusively. While reading the 3rd edition in 2011, I suddenly realized I hadn't heard anything about Hooked on Phonics in a long time, and Trelease explains why, including information about lawsuits against the company. Trelease then gives the International Reading Associations recommended guidelines for choosing a commercial reading program. Paraphrased, these are: Does the product claim a quick fix?; Does the product profess to be self-teaching?; Does the product have little or no opportunity for reading whole texts?; and Does the product approach reading as isolated skills apart from meaningful text? I was hoping that the 6th edition would address 2011's current miracle reading program, Your Baby Can Read, but it does not address this type of program at all. (Instead, it does address computerized reading programs that quiz students on books and award points. Trelease is against how these programs wind up being used, and I can't agree more because my 6th grade reading experience mirrors his discussion). But, using my own judgment, it appears to me that Your Baby Can Read does not meet all of the IRA's criteria.

This book has an abundance of editions, with one dating back to 2019. However, my library had the 2006 edition, so it's important to keep that in mind when considering my review.

If you're not in the mood for a negative review, here are a couple of TEDx Talks that present the same concept in a much better way: \\"Why We All Need to Start Reading Aloud to Our Kids\\" by Keisha Siriboe (evidence-based) and \\"Why We Should All Be Reading Aloud to Children\\" by Rebecca Bellingham (anecdote-based).

Trelease has built a career as a read-aloud advocate. In The Read-Aloud Handbook, he shares statistics about reading aloud, stories about its impact on child development and academic success, and an extensive list of read-aloud books. I suspect this is one of the significant revisions in the 2019 edition, although I was satisfied with the intentional choices in the 2006 edition. By this edition, Trelease's children were well into adulthood, but he has remained updated on children's book publishing. I appreciated his inclusion of recommendations for fairy tales that deviate from the Prince Charming trope (Tatterhood and Other Tales) and picture books about the Civil Rights movement (Goin' Someplace Special by Patricia McKissack, with additional recommendations following).

All the other recent read-aloud books I've read (except for Annis Duff's, which were written decades before the original edition of Trelease's book) recommend The Read-Aloud Handbook. The Read-Aloud Family even references it in the title and numerous times in the text. I think Trelease conveys his message more effectively in person. He frequently mentions his public speaking engagements, and I can envision him as a dynamic and humorous speaker. However, this doesn't translate as well in this edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Here, his thoughts seem scattered, stories are referenced before they're told, and other editions of the book are mentioned so often that I felt like I had to read the entire series of Handbooks to get the full picture.

Although it's hardly Trelease's fault, The Read-Aloud Handbook is unfortunately outdated almost as soon as it was published. The iPhone was released the year after this edition of the Handbook, and it changed everything. I'm certain the 2019 edition covers the influence of personal electronic devices on child development, while the 2006 edition focuses on TV and the internet, not addressing social media since it shares a birth year with Facebook. However, this edition doesn't, making it a strange throwback to my childhood but not as useful for today.

Trelease is extremely dissatisfied with the American education system, particularly incensed by No Child Left Behind, and he criticizes it at every opportunity. It becomes quite tiresome, and I've never even been a public school student, teacher, or parent! He's not advocating for alternative schooling, such as private/parochial/home schools, but he does make parents feel bad about the system their kids are in. Reading aloud is, of course, the solution, but his complaining about the system isn't constructive. He could have presented, through carefully chosen statistics and anecdotes, how the system is failing children and then moved on to explain why reading aloud will help. Instead, we're subjected to nearly constant ridicule of the education system. Even though Trelease provides specific anecdotes and resources for underprivileged families (including the old Ben Carson story), his tone can sometimes come across as elitist. But he's so passionate about the benefits of reading aloud that he wants it promoted with the same vigor as anti-tobacco advertising. An interesting, albeit somewhat crazy, idea. (This is all related to his views on the way the US government manages education. While I technically agree with him*, he's so irritating about it that I wish I didn't.)

I do like to think that Trelease's ideas have had some influence in places like local libraries. My own library has a program where parents can track the books they read to their kids (re-reads count!), and there are rewards for every hundred books. The goal is \\"1000 Books before Kindergarten.\\" At one book a day, that's three years. At five books a day, that's seven months. Programs like these are low-threshold, easy-entry ways to get parents involved in reading aloud, regardless of whether the parents themselves read books like these.

Overall, this book is worth it for the list of books at the back, but the information is so muddled by Trelease's political opinions that it's painful to read. I'm moderately interested in the 2019 edition, but not really, because I don't want to subject myself to more of Trelease's strong opinions on politics. I can only imagine his hatred for Common Core! My lasting impression of this book is not an exhortation to read aloud. Instead, it's a memory of being hit in the face by Trelease's dislike of the US public education system.

*His main points are: the government runs schools like businesses, children are over-tested, and school libraries don't receive enough (non-digital) resources. While he's correct that government programs often disregard hard data on how children succeed, he doesn't need to be so annoying about it to his readers, who are likely not legislators! He also relies too much on cheerful stories of volunteerism to address the problems rather than presenting a better way to educate, perhaps one that parents can encourage legislators to support.

Book is no longer necessary, if it ever was.

This could have been a concise article highlighting the positive effects of reading aloud on infants, children, and young adults. However, it instead veers into lecturing the reader about how we can read our way out of poverty.

A handbook is supposed to provide information such as facts on a particular subject or instructions for operating a machine.

It would have scored better if the focus was on the elements of reading a story aloud, like the auditory experience of verbalizing a story and providing it with a theatrical delivery when the text calls for it. Also, how to effectively deliver that speech, dialogue, or descriptions. Instead, with Trelease, we get tips scattered throughout a deluge of useless stats on the merits of literacy.

What came first, the books being donated by private donors or the medicine, housing, or access to full fresh food that children need in America? Trelease clearly is interested in saving the world's impoverished, but I don't believe he accomplished it, and this book surely is not the place for that. It's a shame, really.

The title is deceptive, and the author is preachy.

The treasury has been excised and is now found on Goodreads lists. As for the book itself, it's not worth it.

The reading list at the end of the book had some really good suggestions. However, in order to reach that list, one had to endure all the political bashing by the author.

It seems that the author holds the belief that Christians and Republicans don't read to their kids, which is completely untrue. Instead of being a positive advocate for reading, the author chose to use the book as a platform to bash conservatives. This was not at all what I had expected.

The author's tone was arrogant, insulting, and rude. It really turned me off. I would much rather read a book like "Honey for a Child's Heart" which, I assume, would offer a more positive and respectful approach to the topic of reading and its importance.

In conclusion, this particular book failed to meet my expectations due to the author's inappropriate and unnecessary political bashing.

Every now and again, when I receive new books to shelve, I come across one (or quite a few) that I pull aside to read for myself. That's precisely how I stumbled upon today's remarkable book.

The Read-Aloud Handbook (7th Edition) by Jim Trelease immediately caught my eye, and the reason is simple: I'm a huge nerd when it comes to my profession. :-D

The first half of the book delves into the crucial importance of reading, and more specifically, reading aloud to children from birth to...well, forever. This isn't just Trelease's personal take; it's solidly supported by extensive research and a wealth of data on the topic.

However, it's not all dry technical jargon filled with charts and numbers. He enlivens the text with examples from his own childhood, which he describes as 'print rich'. His father not only modeled good reading habits but also read to him regularly. He was also fortunate to have a teacher who read aloud to the class each day. (Sadly, this is a rarity in schools due to the demanding standardized testing schedules, something I firmly oppose.) He also received encouragement from a teacher who sent a note home to his parents, praising his behavior and writing ability. (That really can make a world of difference, folks!)

Trelease also shares insights into the upbringing of his own children and their nightly routine of book reading. Perhaps the most captivating parts of this book are the firsthand accounts of the significance of reading aloud throughout childhood and the numerous benefits it brings. It's filled with anecdotes from principals, teachers, parents, and librarians, all of whom did their part to guide the children in their lives to become lifelong learners and readers.

I've put into practice quite a few of the 'tips and tricks' that he discusses, such as using ebooks and audiobooks for visually impaired and illiterate parents in the workshops and one-on-one discussions I've had with parents in my community. (P.S. Wordless picture books are another excellent resource.)

Whether you're a professional in the field of library sciences or education, or simply someone trying to foster a love of reading in your own children, this book is an absolute must-have. I was so impressed that I bought a copy for myself before I'd even finished reading it! 10/10

Oh, and did I mention that the second half contains a Treasury of books, subdivided by reading comprehension, age group, genre, and best books for reading aloud? WHY AREN'T YOU READING THIS YET?

Another book that I include in baby shower gift baskets is this one.

It contains the research behind the importance of reading aloud to children of all ages, not just the very young ones.

Now, I'm aware that the research part might not be of interest to everyone.

The book also features a great treasury of read aloud books.

In fact, I already have the 5th and 4th editions, but I don't have this particular one yet.

The difference between the 4th and 5th editions was an updated treasury of books, as well as chapters that addressed topics such as Harry Potter, Oprah's book clubs, and the Internet.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the new additions in the 6th edition.

I think it will be an exciting update that will further enhance the value of this wonderful resource for parents and caregivers.

It's always great to have a book that not only provides a collection of great read alouds but also offers insights into the benefits of reading to children at different stages of their development.

This book truly seems to have it all.