The Elder Statesman

The Read Aloud Handbook
By Jim Trelease
A Penguin Book
Quality Paperback $15  

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

This is not a new book in the sense of a recently published volume, but it is a new release of a book by Jim Trelease that dates back to the original publication in 1982. It is a completely revised and updated 2007 edition and I can vouch for that because on my bookshelf there is the hardbound original published by this master of reading aloud.

Actually, that edition was not actually the original book. The true original was a 1979 self-published edition. Trelease was a newspaper reporter on the Springfield, Mass. Daily News, (now The Springfield Republican) when he got the idea for the book after a school teacher, Mary A. Dryden, asked him to read aloud to her students 39 years ago. In this newest edition, he acknowledges that teacher’s influence with "everlasting gratitude."

Trelease said he began weekly volunteer visits to classrooms and discovered many students didn’t read very much, but the ones who did nearly always came from classrooms where the teachers read aloud. He understood the importance of this because he was reading aloud to his two children, largely because his father had read to him.

Thinking there might be a connection between being read to and how much the child wanted to read, his reporter instincts caused him to investigate that theory to see if any research was available. Nearly all that he found was published in education journals or written in academic language that would be foreign to the average parent or teacher.

This led him to write the first edition of "The Read-Aloud Handbook" in 1979. "I self-published the book because no major publisher was interested. He has the rejection slips to prove it.

Penguin bought the manuscript in 1982. "Dear Abby" wrote about the book in a February 1983 column. Sales skyrocketed and as a result "The Read Aloud Handbook" spent 17 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. To date, it has sold over 2 million copies.

What started as a homemade product became so popular that in 1985 the U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on Reading was calling "reading aloud to children" the single most important activity one could do to make a child a reader. Trelease’s crusade became the inspiration for PBS’s "Storytime" series.

The handbook is used as a text for future teachers in more than 60 colleges and universities. Trelease is also the author of two related books, "Hey! Listen to This" an anthology of 48 read-aloud stories that parents and teachers can share with children from Kindergarten to the 4th grade and "Read All About It!" 50 read-aloud pieces aimed at preteens and teens. Both books are published by Penguin.

The handbook is divided into two parts, the first half contains the ways of creating readers and the last half consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 1,000 children’s books for reading aloud.

"A consistent mistake made by parents and teachers is the assumption that a child’s listening level is the same as his or her reading level," Trelease said. "Until about 8th grade, that is far from true. Early primary grade students listen many grades above their reading level. This means that early primary grade students are capable of hearing and understanding stories that are far more complicated than those they can read themselves."

Now a grandfather of three boys, he recalls reading to his own children, Jamie and Elizabeth, when they were teens. "I would read aloud newspaper columns, magazine articles, sometimes portions of a novel that I was reading for myself. Lifetime readers swim in a sea of print from many different sources — not just books," he said.

Trelease is at times angry with the way publishers decide on what young people will, or will not read. "With each selection I have attempted to rectify what I have long felt was a mistake on the part of publishers," he said. "They go to great expense publishing the work of the author, but devote only an inch of copy in the book or on its jacket to biographical information. Books are written by people, not machines. They are created by men and women with fascinating personal stories of how they came to be writers or how they created a particular story."

He said he is on a crusade to share his joy of reading. He wrote the book to for "anyone interested in passing the torch of literacy from one generation to the next and touching the lives of children in a tender and lasting manner."

(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Opinion Page of The News-Review every Thursday.)