Ah, reading books aloud to kids. There’s almost no better method for turning young minds into great students than this, and Jim Trelease nails it in this book with all the research to prove it.

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I’ve long been an advocate for reading aloud, and I’ve been doing it ever since my kids were born. They’re 12 and 14 now. We’re still reading together at night, and I hope this practice continues all the up until they head out on their own.

This book is so filled with good information, it will be hard to limit my notes to a normal, book-review length. But I’ll try. I’ve broken this review down into three main topics about reading aloud to children: Timing, Methods, and Societal Impact.

Timing

Babies

Although Trelease mentions that children can distinguish the voices and rhythms of parents who read to them in the womb (Chapter 2), he’s quick to note that sooner isn’t always better when it comes to teaching kids how to read, particularly emphasizing the delayed education but advanced reading skill of students in Finland (7-8, 151-153). I love this silly illustration he makes in the Introduction to prove his point:

Sooner is not better. Are the dinner guests who arrive an hour early better guests than those who arrive on time? (xxi)

He mentions repeatedly that the toys we’re tempted to purchase to ensure our kids become the best “Baby Einsteins” generally don’t have the impact we suppose. Instead, games teach them letters not words, and on-screen activities actually turn them to screens and video games and away from books! He posits: the more accessible print materials are in the house, the better. The more they see their parents reading, the better. And most importantly, the more they hear great stories read aloud to the from real books, the better.

He also makes a very interesting point about strollers (17), how “the buggy” that once positioned a child to face her parents has been reversed, so that now in the stroller, the child faces away from the parent. While this might help bombard the child with images of nature and the world, it also reduces conversation between parent and child by more than half—that is, the child hears less than half the number of words from the parents while they stroll. That may not seem significant at first, but it should cause a parent to pause and ask how it benefits the child to give them images of the world in favor of the gaze and voice of the parent.

Young Kids

When my kids were just getting out of diapers, I got a job at a 4-year kindergarten, where both my kids were students and I taught “the seniors” (a.k.a. the 5-6 year olds; yeah, Asia is weird). Nevertheless, I had access to a full kindergarten library and could have taken fuller advantage of it, but I felt my kids were smarter than The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar and the hundredth reading of Brown Bear.

When we got home each night, I forwent the baby books and instead enjoyed cracking open my full collection of Tintin books by Herge. They loved them. It was like watching a little movie for them, but with still images and dad there to read the voices and to ask and answer questions. I’d point at every picture and explain it (if necessary), then point at whichever character was speaking.

I was thrilled to see that Trelease not only recommends Tintin as a read-aloud book (100-101) but also recommends comic books of all kinds (chapter 5). This is encouraging to me, because this is definitely how I started reading as a child and it’s how my own son (now 14) started reading on his own several years ago. It’s also confirmation that I’m not all that crazy to still be in love with graphic novels. In fact, in Chapter 3, he also mentions that people are never too old for picture books (63-64), suggesting that teachers might be shocked at how even high schoolers will get hooked on a Caldecott-winning book when it’s read aloud in class.

High School

Speaking of high-schoolers, I also appreciated this comment Trelease makes in Chapter 6 about parents and teachers forcing “classics” on kids too early:

The goal is to create a lifetime reader, not a future, English teacher. (120)

Music to my ears. I have recently watched both of my children face this issue in school, to the point that they almost don’t want to read anymore. My son (14), who absolutely loved reading all 18 novels in Orson Scott Card’s Enders series, has nearly lost all interest in reading after being assigned Cry, the Beloved Country. My daughter also hated reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by herself, but when she asked for help and I read the book aloud to her, she then understood and loved it.

While comic books shouldn’t be a teen’s only literary intake, and while they’ll eventually need to get over their aversion to “adult books” and classics, I don’t believe it’s in their best interest to foist upon them boring or outdated books, simply because the teacher thinks they need the culture. We can help refine teenagers’ tastes with wiser options and different methods—and reading “boring” classics aloud together in a way that draws them into story might be the ticket.

Method and Tips

Trelease fills his book with wonderful tips and methods for reading aloud. In fact, his entire Chapter 4: “The Dos and Don’ts of Read-Aloud” is simply a bulleted list of 46 Dos and 14 Don’ts that really let the rubber meet the road. Some of my favorite Dos were these:

• Keep a “flood book” in the car like a piece of emergency equipment, just in case you got a delay in the road or in the doctor’s office. (76)
  
• Keep a map of the US on the wall and mark the locations where your stories are set and where the characters go. (76)
  
• Allow the kids to doodle while you read. (76)

This last one is my favorite. I recall a professor in college who gave everyone Twizzler ropes before class one day. Every student but I chomped down on them; I instead “doodled” with the strings throughout the entirety of the class, absorbing the lecture but enjoying myself besides. He took me aside after class and told me it was a test of creativity, and that I was the only one who passed!

That incident has stuck with me, and as a lifelong doodler anyway, I still encourage my kids to doodle in class, in church, in the car, wherever—because the process of “mindlessly” filling a paper with the hands and eyes has a direct connection to the process of absorbing information with the ears and the brain.

Another great tip Trelease shares is the importance of using Closed-Captioning or Subtitles while watching TV or movies. Our family has done this for years, because my wife is an ESL learner and teacher. Reading Trelease’s support of this practice was a huge boon to my confidence:

The number of words flowing across the screen in the course of three hours of closed captioning TV is more than the average adult would read in a daily newspaper or a weekly magazine. Enabling the TV is closed. Captioning is the equivalent of a newspaper subscription, but unlike the subscription, it cost nothing. (152-153, Ch. 8)

Very often while we’re watching someone onscreen, my daughter will ask what a word means, simply because we both read it and heard it together. This is far less likely to happen if she only hears a new word in the context of a conversation.

For Jim Trelease, getting kids proficient in reading boils down to this:

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; the more you like it, the more you do it. The more you read, the more you know; the more you know, the smarter you grow. (4)

But what can a person do if they read a book they hate? It happens, because yes, there are some bad books out there! In Chapter 3, Trelease recommends Nancy Pearl’s “rule of 50″—which is so much like Tony Reinke’s “100-minus-your-age” that I love so much:

If you’re 50 or younger, give every book about 50 pages. If you’re over 50, then subtract your age from 100 and give it that many pages. simply put, there’s a limit to how much mental punishment anyone should have to endure from an author. (67)

Societal Impact

The importance of this topic of reading isn’t merely personal or filial. Trelease makes a strong argument that this is a national, societal issue. Everyone knows that American test scores have been tanking for decades, and it’s all because our country has dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. Trelease argues that poorer families spend more time on media at home, own fewer print materials, and most certainly read less aloud as a family. This lowers student vocabulary, lowers their scores, keeps them behind, and perpetuates a false idea that schools are rigged against poor folks and minorities.

I am so grateful that he took time in Chapter 8 to share the story of Dr. Ben Carson! The reality is that anyone in America, no matter their socio-economic level, has at minimum both the choice to turn off the screens and the option access to public libraries. Young Ben’s mother Sonya, illiterate herself, knew the dangers of letting her sons watch TV all day. She limited their exposure (note: she didn’t throw the TV away!) and required them to read and report on a certain number of books each week. This single action developed in both boys an appreciation for books, a desire to read, and a love for learning that led them both to the heights of success as adults.

The Carson story should not be a rare one, but sadly it is. Trelease writes of the important influence reading can have a community and the nation:

Change the reading scores and you change the graduation rate and the prison population—which changes the social climate of America. (xxvi)

He goes further to suggest that this isn’t even an issue that must be settled by the Department of Education (thank God!). Instead, he says this:

If we can rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of $800-plus billion, we can easily fix all the urban schools and public libraries in America. All we have to do is believe that it’s worth it. If we had to, we could build a strong case that it would come under Homeland Security: Today’s desperate fifteen-year-old semiliterate in urban America is tomorrow’s unemployed, homegrown terrorist. (107)

I don’t know if DOW Secretary Pete Hegseth, who co-wrote Battle for the American Mind (2022), has this concept on his radar, but I sure hope someone in Washington does! It’s one of the most accurate political statements I’ve read in quite a while—especially as we watch the violence of Antifa, trantifa, and other anti-American, anarchist, socialist movements make headway in the U.S. How might things be different if these children had learned to read and think for themselves, instead of getting their heads pumped with lies by social media?

Conclusion

This was a fantastic book to read, even though I’m probably reviewing an “old” edition. No idea how many editions there are now, but I hope this book keeps getting updated with new, valuable research.

If you’re not a reader, there’s no time to start like the present. If you’re a reader, awesome. Let people see you read. Better yet, let them hear it.

When something strikes you as poignant or humorous or confusing, read it aloud. Start that conversation. Share the spark. Set the world ablaze with reading again.

©2025 E.T.

Check Out These Books about Reading:

• The Seven Joys of Reading by Mary Wright Plummer (1856)
• The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac by Eugene Field (1895)
• Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn (1982)
• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (2011)
• Lit! by Tony Rienke (2011)
• One for the Books by Joe Queenan (2012)
• The Read-Aloud Handbook (7th Edition) by Jim Trelease (2013)