As a teacher, I want to grow readers.  I want to help children develop a sense of understanding.  I want children to become curious, and eager to discover.  I learned early on that in order to do this, it all begins with language and hearing words.  Fact:  a child’s success in school in all areas, not just reading, is directly attributed to the number of words s/he hears.  As a parent of young children, that fact alone made me want to run to the public library.  And I did.  As a teacher, I became an advocate for reading to children.  I just knew that pouring all those words into their brains was filling the learning reservoir.  It happens in this order –  listening, speaking, reading, then writing.

Reading aloud became a passion and a constant in my classroom.  The guru of reading aloud, Jim Trelease, visited my classroom to hear…