Are children reading
enough? Not according to most parents and teachers,
who know that reading aloud with children fosters a
lifelong love of books, ensures better standardized
test scores, promotes greater success in school, and
helps instill the values we most want to pass on.
Esmé Codell-an inspiring
children's literature specialist and an energetic teacher-has
the solution. She's turned her years of experience with
children, parents, librarians, and fellow educators
into a great big indispensable volume designed to help
parents get their kids excited about reading.
Here are hundreds of easy and
inventive ideas, innovative projects, creative activities,
and inspiring suggestions that have been shared, tried,
and proven with children from birth through eighth grade.
This five-hundred-page volume
is brimming with themes for superlative storytimes and
book-based birthday parties, ideas for mad-scientist
experiments and half-pint cooking adventures, stories
for reluctant readers and book groups for boys, step-by-step
instructions for book parades, book-related crafts,
storytelling festivals, literature-based radio broadcasts,
readers' theater, and more. There are book lists galore,
with subject-driven reading recommendations for science,
math, cooking, nature, adventure, music, weather, gardening,
sports, mythology, poetry, history, biography, fiction,
and fairy tales. Codell's creative thinking and infectious
enthusiasm will empower even the busiest parents and
children to include literature in their lives.
