Jim Trelease - The Read-Aloud Handbook: Seventh Edition

Penguin Books

The Read-Aloud Handbook

Before retiring from the lecture circuit in 2008, Jim Trelease spent thirty years addressing parents, teachers, and librarians on the subjects of children, literature, and the challenges of multimedia to print. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, he was an award-winning artist and writer for the Springfield Daily News from 1963 to 1983.

Initially self-published in 1979, The Read-Aloud Handbook has had seven American editions as well as British, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish editions. Mr. Trelease is also the editor of two popular read-aloud anthologies for Penguin: Hey! Listen to This, for grades K4, and Read All About It! for preteens and teens. In 2010, Penguin Books named The Read-Aloud Handbook one of the seventy-five most important books it published in its seventy-five-year history.

The father of two grown children, Mr. Trelease lives in Enfield, Connecticut, with his wife, Susan. Although he occasionally scolds American fathers for obsessing too much about sports, recent years have found him involved in one of professional sports most famous moments, when it was accidentally discovered that he had the only existing recording of the 1961 basketball game in which Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points. Visit his Web page (www.trelease-on-reading.com/wilt.html) for the story of how he came to make the recording and how Chamberlains life intertwined with his own.

Jim Treleases lectures are available on both DVD and CD. For information, go to www.trelease-on-reading.com.

It works with fathers, too.

The

Read-Aloud
Handbook

SEVENTH EDITION

Jim Trelease

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

The Read-Aloud Handbook first published in Penguin Books 1982

First revised edition published 1985

Second revised edition (with the title The NewRead-Aloud Handbook) published 1989

Third revised edition published 1995

Fourth revised edition published 2001

Fifth revised edition published 2006

This sixth revised edition published 2013

Copyright Jim Trelease, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1989, 1995, 2001, 2006, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Portions of this book were originally published in pamphlet form.

Disgraceful Interrogations by Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2011. Copyright 2011.

Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Trelease, Jim.

The read-aloud handbook / Jim Trelease.Seventh edition.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61386-3

1. Oral reading. I. Title.

LB1573.5.T68 2013

372.452dc23 2013002348

Designed by Elke Sigal

To my grandchildren, Connor, Tyler, Kiernan, Tess, and Addisynthe best audiences an old reader-aloud could hope to find.

And to Alvin R. Schmidt, a ninth-grade English teacher in New Jersey who found the time a half century ago to write to the parents of one of his students to tell them they had a talented child. Neither he nor the vote of confidence has ever been forgotten.

We must take care that childrens early encounters with reading are painless enough so they will cheerfully return to the experience now and forever. But if its repeatedly painful, we will end up creating a school-time reader instead of a lifetime reader.

Acknowledgments

T HIS book could not have been written without the support and cooperation of many friends, associates, neighbors, children, teachers, and editors. I especially wish to acknowledge my everlasting gratitude to the late Mary A. Dryden, of Springfield, Massachusetts, who started it all by convincing me to visit her classroom forty-five years ago in the school that is now named in her honor.

I am also deeply indebted to my former editors and colleagues at the Springfield Daily News for their long-standing support of staff involvement with the communitys schoolchildren. It was this that provided the early impetus for my experiences in the classroom. At the same time, I am particularly grateful to my dear friend Jane Maroney, whose guiding hand shaped the initial concept of this book. I never had a better, smarter, or wittier editor.

It is impossible to express adequately the gratitude I feel toward the hundreds of individuals who, over the past three decades, took the time to share with me their personal experiences with reading and children, only a fraction of which I can use in each edition. For this edition, I am especially grateful to Melissa Olans Antinoff; Jim and Kristen Brozina; Tom Corbett; Bianca Cotton and her family; Kimberly Douglas; Henry Dutcher; Ellie Fernands; Jennie Fitzkee; Nancy Foote; Linda, Jim, and Erin Hassett; Skip Johnson; Stephen Krashen; Mary Kuntsal; Larry LaPrise; Cindy Lovell; Jade Malanson; Kathy Nozzolillo; Mike Oliver; Tom ONeill Jr.; Jennifer, Marcia, and Mark Thomas; the Trelease-Keller-Reynolds clans of Massachusetts and Mississippi; Susan, Tad, Christopher, and David Williams; and Marty and Joan Wood.

In addition, I would like to thank my neighbor Shirley Uman, whose enthusiasm for my self-published edition back in 1979 was shared with a then-fledgling literary agent, Raphael Sagalyn, who carried it home to Penguin Books; Bee Cullinan for her early encouragement; my Penguin editors, Rebecca Hunt and Kathryn Court, for their faith and support through the books three decades; and a lovely woman named Florence of Arlington, who wrote the fateful letter that Dear Abby published in 1983 that changed the Treleases lives forever. And finally, I thank my wife, Susan, for her patience and sustenance during the long hours required for each revised edition, especially this one, which included one tornado recovery.

There are many education bloggers out there watchdogging the schoolhouse doors and alerting the rest of us when things go wrong, but none exceed the professionalism of Valerie Strauss, of the Washington Posts The Answer Sheet blog, and Maureen Downey, of the