In honor of the release date of ME WITH YOU, a picture book tailor-made for cuddling in an arm chair for a read-aloud fest, I wanted to talk a bit about reading aloud to kids. Jen Robinson at Jen Robinson’s Bookpage said this far more eloquently back in January than I could ever hope to, but it’s an important enough issue that more of us need to jump on the bandwagon. Jen called for an international initiative to encourage reading aloud to kids. How can we make this happen? I don’t know that I have the answers but I think I can echo her call and perhaps together we can all come up with some ideas.

My own three children are growing up in a household where we speak English, but a school system where they speak Portuguese. All three have learned to read "officially" in Portuguese first because of the efforts of their 4 year old kindergarten teachers. But all three have learned to read English informally because of our efforts at reading aloud to them. I would even say that we did not do enough. We did not read out loud every day. But they’ve grown to love books and words and have incredible vocabularies in English simply because they were read to. They feel at home with books and settle down easily to read a story, on their own or out loud. Perhaps they love to read the books we have in our home so much simply because they were not required to read them. It’s all been purely for pleasure, a free choice free-for-all. No homework assignments, no grammar lessons, no requirements. Their reading has allowed them to experience worlds different from their own, emotional experiences they haven’t yet gone through, and to begin to make the emotional connections they will need when they later face these or similar situations in the real world.

Not only this, but we bond as a family over literature. Mem Fox mentions this in her book, Reading Magic, in which she advocates reading out aloud daily: