Will your son need Ritalin to read well?
Teaching boys is a growing problem for teachers and parents. School authorities may say that your boy has "Attention Deficit Disorder," is hyperactive, anxious, has low self-esteem, has discipline problems, or that he has any of a variety of other problems.
Statistics show that girls mostly do better in than boys in school. They mature a bit earlier, bond better with their mostly female teachers, and better tolerate the tight controls necessary to maintain order in large classes. We believe these are major reasons that there are now many more women than men graduating from college.
The material used to teach reading in the lower grades in schools generally fails to capture the imagination of boys, especially those exposed to TV and PlayStation. There is often no strong interest in reading for children, especially for boys. The content is usually far short of the child’s oral vocabulary and treats subjects with less depth than the child’s own knowledge of the topics. Materials are carefully chosen by professionals more concerned with "social progress" than engaging active boys, whose imaginations crave adventure. Many boys aren't excited by the available materials and find them boring. They may rebel and withdraw from learning. Because their heart isn't in it, they'll do the minimum required to satisfy their well-intentioned teachers. If this reading problem is not corrected in the first years, they will probably never become good students or fully literate. As adults, they may be able to read newspapers, especially the sports pages, but they will never have an interest in the magic of the world around them, and as a result will not develop to their full potential.
If your child is not yet in the fourth grade, it is not too late for you to improve your child’s capability and love of reading at home -- the sooner undertaken, the better. It isn’t all that difficult. But you must spend some time reading to them and with them, and listening to them read. And the material you use must be well tuned to the needs of today's boys. It must be interesting to them.
We have produced, and are producing, a series of first reader books of specific interest to boys, and of course to many girls. These brief books can be printed at your home from our web site. The first book is free to you. If you like it, and we are sure that you will, successive volumes are yours for a nominal price. They are in a form (PowerPoint, other formats on request) that makes it easy for you to tune them to your child's specific interests, even including your child’s name and photo. The series progresses through words that are already in the child’s oral vocabulary, and thus easy to learn. An editor who is a father figure, if available, works best. He will work with the boy to create his own book, which he can then read to friends and relatives.
Background:
American schoolchildren are becoming poorer readers with each passing year. The "no child left behind" act and the increasing expenditure per pupil are not solving the problem. You, the parent, are deeply concerned, and do not know what to do about this. If you have sufficient income, you may elect to pay for a private school. If not, you hope that the government will continue to spend ever-increasing amounts of tax money in your public school, or pay for "vouchers" enabling attendance at a "better" school with "better" teachers.
Disadvantaged parents and the teachers unions think that more money, allowing smaller classes, will solve the problem. It hasn’t yet; an example is the District of Columbia, which has one of the highest expenditures per student, but lowest reading (and math) achievement. Still more money and private schools may help, but they will not make good and enthusiastic readers without the help of the parents.
Most teachers are at a loss about what they can do to help boys take an interest in reading. They have been trained to use phonics and word structure, but the reading texts are predetermined by "the system." When most children enter school they are already "behind the curve." The root causes are:
The following quotations are from the primer Fun with Our Friends, published in 1962 and used in the Montgomery County School system (which is self-appraised as one of the best in the nation!). "Fun with Our Friends introduces 101 new words and reintroduces the 75 words used in the Pre-Primers…Each word is used a minimum of ten times in the Primer…The following list (which followed) shows the 101 new words that appear in Fun with Our Friends…The 18 starred words that are printed in black are counted as new. These are words that pupils with their developing knowledge of written language and sound, can be expected to attack by combining context clues with phonetic or structural analysis (emphasis added)." We note the almost total absence of excitement and emotion in this primer, and the expectation that first grade students and teachers will be forced to use material in a manner that would not be tolerated by thinking adults. It is, indeed, in the style of "See Jane, See Jane run. Run, Jane run. See Dick. See Dick run. Run, Dick, run. …."
The following are quotations from an authoritative 1981 treatise entitled "On Learning to Read." The lead authors are Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan, who had long experience in repairing failing and disturbed children of the Orthogenic School of Chicago.
"Children who acquire a great interest in reading in their homes have an easy time reading in school, and they form the overwhelming majority of those who later become the good readers." "What results from these conditions (the search for reading texts that will not offend anyone’s sensibilities) are readers containing an agglomeration of endlessly repeated words that pretend to be stories, although they are not. These books are given to the teachers for teaching reading. The teachers don’t like them, but feel they have to use them…It made the children angry that they were considered so stupid." " Most adults are able to read but see little purpose in reading…" "The worst aspect of the way reading is presently taught is the impression the child receives during his earlier years that skills such as decoding are what reading is all about." "From 1920 to 1962 there was a continuous decline in the number of words used in these (first grade) readers. "First readers published in the 1920's contained, on average, 645 different words. In the 1940's and 1950's, the vocabulary had become further reduced to about 350 words…And, as the number of words in the stories and the entire book declined from edition to edition, their contents became more boring and repetitious. During this same period, the number of pictures per 100 running words nearly doubled…Recent evidence indicates that pictures may hinder the child’s attempts at building comprehension."
"By this age most children already know and use a vocabulary of 5,000 words or more…The least verbal group of first graders masters on the average well over 2,000 words, thus rendering useless and irrelevant the claim that these first primers must employ very few words so that they will not make things difficult for children coming from culturally-deprived homes." "If we wish to induce children to become literate persons, our teaching methods should be in accordance with the richness of the child’s spoken vocabulary, his intelligence, his natural curiosity, his eagerness to learn new things, his wish to develop his mind and his comprehension of the world, and his avid desire for the stimulation of his imagination --- in short, by making reading an activity of intrinsic interest. This would beguile the child. When this is done, nonreaders of long standing, children who have rejected all learning, become fascinated with reading…At the Orthogenic School, (upon making reading an activity of intrinsic interest) some of them easily learned to recognize words that carried emotional significance for them after having seen them once or twice…They did not find it difficult to learn to read ten or more such often complicated words in a day."
Rudolf J. Engelmann, PhD
To Order:
To order the books, just email us. Continue to visit this site, as we are continually adding books in progression, and in response to feedback from you. You may provide feedback by sending it to feedback@boyscanread.com
Here's a first level primer as illustration.
Some additional sources of information on getting older boys excited about reading:
http://www.guysread.com/