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"Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading," (p. 20). This led me to think about the ramifications of societal/cultural change in terms of economic class and the pressure for working parents.

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To be sure, the relationship between readers and text differs across cultures and across history. Thousands of lives have been altered or lost depending on whether a sacred text like the Bible is read in a concrete, literal way or in a generative, interpretative way

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I have several Golden Lines, but my first one from chapter 1 is: ". . . we are what we read."

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"Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts." pg. 9

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"...the experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally and figuratively, to a changed brain" (p.18).

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Children who never have a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelming against them. Pg 20

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"We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill." neurons that fire together wire together

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Page 7

"It is said that Machiavelli would sometimes prepare to read by dressing up in the period of the writer he was reading and then setting a table for the two of them."

I loved this quote because our literature instructor would do the same and I loved how it made such an impression on me!

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"The Thrust of this book ..... will be more biological and cognitive rather than cultural-historical" (p.17)

I wonder what the cultural-historical implications would be.

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P.4. Knowing what reading demands of our brain and knowledge how it contributes to our capacity to think, to feel, to infer, and to understand other human beings is especially important today as we make the transition from a reading brain to an increasingly digital one.

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...we do not need to choose between two modes of communication; rather, we must be vigilant not to lose the profound generativity of the reading brain, as we add new dimensions to our intellectual repertoire. p. 23

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"What is it about the dyslexic brain that seems linked in some people to unparalleled creativity in their professions..." made me think about the many students I have had with dyslexia and how they blossomed with this information... that such smart and talented people in our world were also like them.

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Page 6 "Proust saw reading as a kind of intellectual sanctuary where human beigns have accesss to thousands of different realities they might never encounter or understand otherwise."

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Socrates' protests-the silent rebellion of Plato as he recorded every word-are notably relevant today as we and our children negotiate our own transition from a written culture to one that is increasingly driven by visual images and massive streams of digital information. p. 19

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"Why Socrotes directed all his legendary rhetorical skills against the Greek alphabet and the acquisition of literacy is one of the great, largely untold stories in the history of reading." (18 & 19)

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Page 22. Will individuals with dyslexia be better suited for the demands to the visiual, technology dominated future?

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The cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like "bug," we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, six-legged creature) but also the bug's less frequent associations-spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software. He discovered that the brain doesn't find just one simple meaning for a word.... Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts. (p.9)

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“What is historically humbling about Sumerian writing and pedagogy is not their understanding of morphological principles, but their realization that the teaching of reading must begin with explicit attention to the principal characteristics of oral language. This is exactly what takes place today in the supposedly ‘cutting‑edge’ curricula in our own lab where we incorporate all major aspects of language in our reading instruction. It makes perfect sense.” (pp. 52–53)

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Reading never "just happened"

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Those who can read see twice as well. Ch. 3

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Page 42 Chapter 2 Underlying most convoluted writing systems around the world can be found the wish of one culture to preserve a previous culture or language that shaped it.

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"The next step in the process involves a growing understanding of pictures..." Underlying this development is a visual system that is fully functional by six months, an attention system that has a long road ahead to maturation, and a conceptual system that grows by leaps and bounds each day."

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We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. In this process, we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language.We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. In this process we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language. (p.86)

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"...semantic development plays much more of a role than many advocates of phonics recognize, but far less of a role than advocates of whole language assume." To follow, the three principal related to semantic development: Knowing the Meaning Enhances the Reading, Reading Propels Word Knowledge, and Multiple Meanings Enhance Comprehension. Pgs. 122-124

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"Fluency is not a matter of speed; it is a matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about the word--its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings--fast enough to have time to think and comprehend. Everything about a word contributes to how fast it can be read. The point of becoming fluent, therefore, is to read--really read--and understand," (p. 130-131).

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"First, I saw how determined Sister Salesia was, and how tenaciously she and Jim's mother held on to his potential, even when Jim was ready to quit...Then I knew that Sister Salesia and his mother were doing something miraculous," (p. 112).

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Young children learn to experience new feelings through exposure to reading, which in turn, prepares them to understand more complex emotions. page 85

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Page 88

When the children in the "well-read-to" group told their own stories, they used not only more of the special "literary" language of books than the other children but also more sophisticated syntactic forms, longer phrases, and relative clauses.

I liked this because it is important to read to children to help develop their vocabulary.

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All professionals who deal with children can help to ensure that parents understand the contribution they can make to their child’s potential…

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"...children who grow up in environments with few or no literacy experiences are already playing catch-up when they enter kindergarten and the primary grades" (102).

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pg 102

What happens to children as they enter kindergarten has serious consequences for the rest of their lives- for them, and for all of us.

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Pg. 84

The more children are spoken to, the more they understand oral language. The more children are read to, the more they understand all the language around them, and the more developed their vocabulary becomes.

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".... the most important precursor for reading, early language development...pivitol insight that things have names" (p. 83)

Caregivers/ families etc pay a vital role in this stage. I fear that our talk of evidence based instruction, test scores, strategy and professionalism have colonized these spaces and disempowered important role-players.

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"Phonological development - how a child gradually learns to hear, segment, and understand the small units of sounds that make up words - drastically affects the child's ability to grasp and learn the rules of letter sounds at the hear of decoding."

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Page 123

When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years, and hat at least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge imporance of a child's development of vocabulary becomes crystal clear.

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Learning to read is an almost miraculous story filled with many developmental processes that come together to give the child entry into the teeming underlife of a word usable by the child.

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Page 71

In exampining written language, Socrates took a stand that usually comes as a surpirse: he felt passionately that the written word posed serious risks to society.

VS...

Page 73

...Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one's thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to disover new ways of thinking.

My position is that if we can marry both discussion and love of writing we can help students excel in the practice of reading.

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"One well-known educational psychologist contends that the two greatest aids to fluent comprehension are explicit instruction by a child's teachers in major content areas and the child's own desire to read." pg. 139

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"The sheer amount of evidence showing the efficacy of phoneme awareness and explicit instruction in decoding for early reading skills could fill a library wall." pg. 175

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P.136 "We know a lot about developmental dyslexia and intervention, but we know far less about the more ordinary problems of children who never attain fluency for various reasons that do not lend themselves to diagnosis: such as, a poor environment, a poor vocabulary, and instruction not matched to their needs...Whatever the reasons, to have close to 40 percent of OUR children "underachieving" reflects a horrific waste of human potential."

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"There is no one form of dyslexia; instead, there is a continuum of developmental reading disabilities that reflects many components of reading, as well as the specific writing system in a given language," (p. 193).

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"The fluent, comprehending reader's brain is on the threshold of attaining the single most essential gift of the evolved reading brain: time. With its decoding processes almost automatic, the young fluent brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, affective background and experiential knowledge with every newly won millisecond," (p. 143).

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"Dyslexia cannot be anything so simple as a flaw in the brain's "reading center," for no such thing exists. To find the causes of dyslexia, we must look to older structures of the brain and their multiple levels of processes, structures, neurons, and genes, all of which have to come together in rapid synchrony to form the reading circuit." p.168

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..."strategic readers" - "readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during, and after reading, to decide what's important in a text, to synthesize information, to draw inferences during and after reading, to ask questions, and to self-monitor and repair faulty comprehension." Richard Vacca

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Intervention for children with dyslexia should address the development of each of reading's contributing components - from orthography and phonology to vocabulary and morphology - their connections, their fluency, and their integration in comprehension."

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"We must teach our children to be "bitextual," or "multitextual," able to read and analyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text."

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"the single most important implications of research in dyslexia is not ensuring that we don't derail the development of a future Leonardo or Edison; it is making sure that we do not miss the potential of any child."

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"Finally, the single most important implication of research in dyslexia is not ensuring that we don't derail the development of a future Leonardo or Edison; it is making sure that we do not miss the potential of any child. Not all children with dyslexia have extraordinary talents, but every one of them has a unique potential that all too often goes unrealized because we don't know how to tap into it," (p. 209).

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"Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis," (pp. 228-229).

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"Those of us who work with children want them to realize that although they may learn differently, each one of them can and will learn to read. It is our job, not theirs, to find out how best to teach them." (p.210)

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Children struggling to read aren’t going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical I. So many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are trained to use a toolbox of principles that they can apply to different types of children”

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Suddenly our ancestors could access knowledge that would no longer need to be repeated over and over again... p 216

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The single most important implication of research in dyslexia is not ensuring that we don't derail the development of a future Leonardo or Edison. p. 209

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When a child has dyslexia, there are no "Unaffected" relatives in the family.

I loved this because we know this is their experience they can add to the dialogue to enhance the student learning potential!

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WWSS-

What

Would

Socrates

Say?

It would be an interesting take on what we are doing now...