He made it clear that the key to the academic success of children is to read aloud to them from the moment they are born.
Jim Trelease died! A man who on his own made it clear that the single most important key to the academic success of children is to be read aloud to from the moment they are born until they graduate from high school. In that book Jim set out the powerful research that demonstrated that the best academic students in school are the students who were read aloud to and who had the widest reading backgrounds.
Jim repeated again and again that there is a 32 million word gap between children in poor families and children in professional, wealthy families. Jim Trelease created a book based on this research advocating that the only way to close the education gap between poverty and wealth is through reading, and in his book he offered one of the most insightful lists of books for each grade level. Our country has tried to improve the quality of education.
Jim believed that student assessment ought to simply be a child’s demonstration of reading proficiency by simply reading aloud, not by filling in bubble answer sheets. The child who reads a lot reads with great success. That success can be demonstrated when a child in fourth grade reads aloud, cold, a page from. Why is it that our highest-achieving students come from our wealthiest schools? Because they read more than children in poor and working-class families.