I LOVE this story about a young man in 2002 who scored a perfect 36 on the A.C.T. If you want your kids to succeed be sure to read to them starting from birth! This story was taken from
Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook, a must-read for all parents and educators:
"We start with the family of Susan and Tad
Williams and sons, Christopher and David. Of the four hundred thousand
students taking the A.C.T. exam with Christopher back in 2002, only
fifty-seven had perfect scores—he was the fifty-eighth. When word got
out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky (population 3,645), had scored a
perfect 36, the family was besieged with questions, the most common
being "What prep course did he take? Kaplan? Princeton Review?" It
turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him as an infant, a free
program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250 an
hour.
"In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses simply told people—including the New York Times—
that he hadn't taken any, that he did no prep work. That, of course,
wasn't completely true. His mother and father had been giving him and
his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from
infancy into adolescence: they read to them for thirty minutes a night,
year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.
"The best S.A.T. prep course is to read to your children when they're little."
"Theirs was a home
brimming with books but no TV Guide, GameCube, or Hooked on Phonics.
Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation teacher, she offered
no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age. She
and Tad just read to them—sowed (and sewed) the sounds and syllables and
endings and blendings of language into the love of books. Each boy
easily learned to read, loved it, gobbled it up voraciously. Besides
being a family bonding agent, reading aloud was used not as test prep as
much as an "ensurance" policy—it ensured the boys would be ready for
whatever came their way in school. That, combined with church and
Scouting, would ensure they were ready for whatever life threw at them.
"By 2011, David was a
University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer and
Christopher was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke. Sometimes
Christopher's early reading experiences surface even in the biochemistry
department, like the day after a Duke basketball loss and he remarked
to his lunch mates, "I guess 'there's no joy in Mudville' today." None
of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Thayer's
classic sports poem."
Inspired by this awesome story?
Grab some news books for your kiddos and start reading to them TONIGHT!
