Lucy McCormick Calkins, “The Art of Teaching Reading,” with Photography by Peter Cunningham (Longman, 2000).

Jim Trelease, “The Read-Aloud Handbook,” 4^th edition (Penguin, 2001).

These books about teaching reading are not just for teachers, even though one might wish that every elementary school teacher would read them. Instead, they are books for anyone who has anything to do with teaching a child to read.

Because “The Art of Teaching Reading” is full of convictions and committed ideas gathered over a lifetime, it is also an exuberantly messy book, even though it is engaging to read and to look at. What makes it messy is its important central idea that “If our teaching of reading is to be an art, we need to draw from all we know, think, and believe in order to create something beautiful.”

In the course of almost 600 vibrant pages, Calkins does exactly that. She draws on all she knows, thinks, and believes about teaching children to read. Two of the fundamental things she knows are that we need to bring our whole selves to the children we want to teach, because reading requires as total a presence of ourselves with them and as complete an engagement with their wonderfully quirky intelligence as we can manage. That means sitting down with them on their level so that we can look them in the eye, take them in our laps, and share their amazement at what pleasure books can offer them.

It also means being ready to learn from them, even to learn again how playful and wayward language is, which is something they have not yet been taught to forget. Calkins has a fine appreciation for children’s errors when they learn to read. Once we understand that their errors are seldom random, we can get a sense of how they are approaching language and how they see the project of reading. We can best teach them—as it always is in teaching—when we can imagine their project as they see it themselves. That enables us also to see resources in language that we may have forgotten.

One of the things that makes this book beautiful is its dynamic photographs of Calkins and her colleagues as they work with children, down on the floor and in their spece, laughing and listening and being present. The teachers, some of the best in the business, are all from Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, which Calkins directs. The children are inner-city New Yorkers. The dozens of photographs are not just ornamental; instead, they illustrate the principles of teaching that the book advocates.

Calkins and Jim Trelease write about teaching reading in a way that is analogous to the way Dr. Spock writes about child-rearing. They teach us how to have confidence in our own best instincts and to believe that we can do the job. They do offer straight-forward advice, but most of it is non-technical, such as these tips from “The Read-Aloud Handbook”:

•Don’t read stories that you don’t enjoy yourself.

•Don’t continue reading a book once it is obvious that it was a poor choice.

•Don’t start reading if you are not going to have enough time to do it justice.

•Don’t impose interpretations of a story upon your audience.

•Don’t use the book as a treat or a reward for something else.

•Do begin reading to children as soon as possible

•Do read as often as you and the child have time for.

•Occasonally read above children’s intellectual levels and challenge their minds.

These are not just feel-good books, by any means. Trelease points out that virtually every child first goes to school wanting to learn to read, but by the time they reach their senior year only 25% read for pleasure. According to reports of the Commission on Reading, reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for building the kind of knowledge that will lead to success in reading and, in turn, in learning other subjects. The problem is not that children aren’t being taught to read; rather, it is that they aren’t taught to want to read. Thus, most of the book buying and reading is done by 30% of the public. It is a dangerous situation for a democracy when such a large portion of the populace is not well informed and can outvote the educated minority.

This problem in the United States is more acute among boys than among girls. American boys are more likely than girls to be in remedial reading classes, to repeat a grade, to drop out of school, and to suffer from learning disabilities. Since this isn’t the case in Israel, Finland, England, Nigeria, India, and Germany, the problem is obviously not genetic. Trelease believes that the explanation lies in the fact that American fathers rarely provide their sons with a role-model as a reader:

“The boy who only sees his father focusing on athletics, who lives in a home or culture where it’s all sports all the time, will allot far less value and time to school than to athletics. The end result has been higher sports scores, lower school scores. …The strange thing is this ‘dumbing of daddy’ seems to affect families at all education levels. …Fathers read to their children only 15 percent of the time, mothers 76 percent, and others 9 percent.”

We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with them: “to reassure, to entertain, to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire”; but we also read aloud to condition the child to associate reading with pleasure, to create background knowledge, and to provide a reading role model. These two books are among the best guides available for this essential project.