"An exuberant treasure trove for parents."
--Publishers Weekly
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 Raji 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.
