1. In all important ways, children are the best readers.
2. Children need to be read to.
3. Children need to hold books in their hands. They need to linger over the artwork. They need to feel how many pages there are and gauge when the end is coming.
4. Children need to know that is not unusual for readers to feel like laughing and crying.
5. Children need to know that learning to read takes practice, focus, and time, but it is really worth it.
6. Children need to know that there are animals and people in books that they will never meet in real life. Yet, as readers, children can feel happy when those characters feel happy, scared when they feel scared, sad when they feel sad.
7. Children need to know that a book on a shelf is just potential. On their own, books are not funny, or scary or sad. Books are brought to life by the minds of their readers.
8. Children need to know that books have all sorts of insides. Some are all pictures; some are all words. Some have rhymes. Some have insides that flip or pop-up. Some have true stories, some imaginative stories. Some are full of pictures and information about our world.
9. Children need to build reading confidence. When reading out loud, children get to work on the nuts and bolts of comprehension: commas, periods, paragraph breaks, pronunciation, expression and timing.
10. Children need to share reading with someone who sees that they are unique, clever, and fun to be with. OUR reading volunteers-young adults who inspire them and older people who stand in for grandparents, are very good at this.