Category: Reading at home

The stack on the nightstand keeps growing. All the same character, all known by heart, all reread. And somebody who means well — a grandmother, a teacher, you at eleven at night — says the line: “yes, but that isn’t reading.”

It turns out there is a table for this.

A comic has 53.5 rare words per thousand. A children’s book has 30.9. Nearly double, in favour of the stack on the nightstand. This is reason 7 of ten reasons someone won’t read, and the only one that gets solved by changing your mind. Nothing at home has to move.

How much rare vocabulary is in a comic?

There is a classic count by Hayes and Ahrens, from 1988, that Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich reproduced in American Educator in 1998. It measures how many rare words turn up per thousand across the places somebody meets language:

Where	Rare words per 1,000
Abstracts of scientific articles	128.0
Newspapers	68.3
Popular magazines	65.7
Comic books	53.5
Adult books	52.7
Children’s books	30.9
Cartoon shows	30.8
Expert witness testimony	28.4
Popular prime-time adult shows	22.7
College graduates to friends and spouses	17.3
Preschool books	16.3

What counts as a “rare word.” The study defines it as one outside the ten thousand most frequent: “roughly a word that is outside the vocabulary of a fourth to sixth grader.” And it adds why that matters: “for vocabulary growth to occur after the middle grades, children must be exposed to words that are rare by this definition” (Cunningham and Stanovich, American Educator, 1998).

Two honest readings of that table, before anyone uses it in a family argument:

• The comparison that matters is with children’s books, and there the gap is wide: 53.5 against 30.9.
• The comparison with adult books calls for caution. 53.5 and 52.7 sit close enough that “comics are richer than a grown-up novel” would be stretching it.

And a note on the date: the count is from 1988. The comics corpus of that era leaves out manga, which went on to take over the market. If somebody publishes a modern replication, this table gets updated.

What work does reading a comic actually do?

The visible work is reading the speech balloons. The work that counts happens somewhere else: in the gap between two panels.

One panel shows somebody running towards a door. The next shows that somebody soaked in the rain. What happened in between — they went out, the door opened onto the street, it started raining — gets supplied by the reader. Nobody writes it down. Every gap between panels is a compulsory inference, and a page holds six or seven of them.

That is exactly the work being asked for by “why do you think the character did that?” The difference is that in a comic they do it fifty times in an afternoon, without being asked.

On top of that: holding track of who is who across a series, following a sequence in time, and reading mood off a drawn face.

Want to see the scaffolding of a story from the inside? Here are the parts of a story explained with an actual story — the same pieces, different bodywork.

Will they move on to “real books”?

They might, and this piece will not promise it.

It is the line in every article on the subject — “comics are a gateway” — and looking for the evidence behind it turns up very little. What is measured is the table: that while they read comics they are meeting rare words at a rate nothing else in their day matches, except a book.

So the comic stands on its own, for what it does today. Treating it as a waiting room for something else also has a practical cost: the reader notices, and noticing that your thing is the lesser version of something better is the fastest way to drop it.

What if what they read is terrible?

It happens, and it is a real objection. Endless series, industrial artwork, repeated jokes.

Two things at once. First, the rare-word rate in that table holds up fairly well regardless of literary quality: the lexical density of a mediocre comic still sits above a good children’s novel. Second, quality does matter, and the route to improving it runs through widening the offer. Withdrawing what is there works against you.

And it is worth knowing what withdrawing costs. In a survey of 1,755 British families, “more than eight in 10 children agree their favourite books –and the ones they are most likely to finish–are the ones they pick out themselves” (Scholastic, 2015). Taking away what they chose takes away the part that makes them finish.

How to build on what they already read

Without asking them to give anything up:

1. Ask what it’s about. No quiz, real curiosity. Someone summarising four volumes of plot is doing reading comprehension out loud.
2. Go to the library and ask for the section. Public and school libraries catalogue graphic novels and somebody there knows them. That is the good list, and it is free.
3. Find the graphic novel of something they already like. Plenty of classics have a panelled version, and so do plenty of history and science series, made by people who know what they are doing.
4. Try the sideways jump before the vertical one. From comics to a picture book with long text, or to illustrated non-fiction. That is where the four formats and what each one does comes in.
5. When they want a book without pictures, let them pick it. That is when three things you can measure with the book in your hands earns its keep.

What to say when someone in the family says it isn’t reading

Three lines, from least to most argument:

“They’re reading more rare words than they would be watching television.” True, and gentle: 53.5 against 22.7, and the table is published.

“School and public libraries catalogue graphic novels alongside novels.” The institutions whose job is deciding what counts as a book settled this a while ago. That is why the section exists, with a librarian attached to it.

“I’d rather they read something every day than nothing three times a year.” This one comes out after the other two. And it comes out without winning the argument: whoever raised it almost always did so because they want that child to do well.

Where to go from here

This week, sit down and ask them to tell you what the one they’re reading is about. It is the cheapest conversation there is, and it will tell you what they are after in that series: humour, belonging, controlled fear, a friendship. That is what to look for next, in whatever format.

And if comics don’t catch either, there are eight more causes worth checking, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change, in the ten reasons.

Where these numbers come from

• Cunningham, Anne E. and Stanovich, Keith E., “What Reading Does for the Mind,” American Educator, 1998. Table 1 is adapted from Hayes and Ahrens (1988), “Vocabulary simplification for children: a special case of ‘motherese’?”, Journal of Child Language. Source
• Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, UK edition. A sample of 1,755 parents and children aged 6 to 17, fielded in summer 2015. Source

Four books open on the nightstand. In three of them the bookmark sits around page twelve. The fourth has been face down for a month, in chapter two.

That pile looks like a character flaw and is something else: it is information.

Where a book gets abandoned tells you what happened. In the first pages it is almost always the cost of entry, and there is a documented effect that explains it. Halfway through it is usually pace. And if every book gets dropped every time, the cause sits outside the book.

This is reason 3 of ten reasons someone won’t read, from the after side.

Where do they stop? That’s the answer

Look at the bookmarks in the last three books they started:

Where it stopped	What it usually means	What to do
Pages 1 to 15	The entry toll: new context, new style	Read that stretch aloud to them
First third	The book’s promise arrived too late	Change books, and look at the pace
Right at the middle	Pace or length	Shorter books, shorter chapters
Near the end	Almost never a problem: they know how it ends	Let it go, they read it
All of them, always, anywhere	The cause sits outside the book	Check the other nine reasons

The surprising row is the second-to-last: stopping near the end is normal. Once the plot has resolved in their head, the book did its job.

Stopping in the first pages: the entry toll

The first pages of a book are the hardest stretch of that book. It sounds odd, and it has a known explanation in language teaching.

Stephen Krashen calls it “the first few pages effect.” He describes it this way: readers of a new work “often report that they find the first few pages of a new author’s work tough going. After this initial difficulty, the rest of the book goes much easier.” And he gives the mechanism: “this is due to the fact that the context, the story, was new, and, in addition, the reader had not adjusted to the author’s style” (Krashen, Language Magazine, 2004).

Where that comes from, so you know. Krashen describes it in intermediate foreign-language students. Here we are talking about an eight-year-old reading in their own language. The mechanism he names — new context plus unadjusted style — is the same one operating in front of an unfamiliar author at eight, so the transfer is reasonable. Tested in that population, not yet.

What to do with it, and it is the cheapest thing in this article: read the first fifteen pages aloud to them. You are paying the toll on their behalf. After that the book runs downhill, and plenty of times they carry on without noticing.

Stopping halfway: the pace

This is the most common case and the one with least to do with willpower.

A book loses its reader when too long goes by without anything happening. In the craft of writing for children that has a known address: the stretch after the problem has been set up and before it starts to resolve. Writers who know it put something there; writers who don’t lose the reader at exactly that point. To see where those hinges sit, here are the parts of a story explained with an actual story.

From outside it diagnoses just as fast. Open it at the bookmark and read two pages: if nothing happens in two pages, you have your answer.

The way out is a different book, chosen better with three things you can measure with the book in your hands: pages, text per page, and how often something happens.

Stopping on all of them, every time

When it happens at any point, with any book, and has for months, the book is innocent.

That is when to look elsewhere: whether decoding still takes everything they have — in which case the story never arrives — whether their head hurts when they read, or whether the hour is wrong. The remaining nine causes are in the ten reasons, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.

The way out that works: the series

If the problem is the entry toll, there is a way to pay it only once: make the next books belong to the same world.

Krashen calls it narrow reading, and the argument is direct. “Since each writer has favorite expressions and a distinctive style, and each topic has its own vocabulary and discourse, narrow reading provides built-in review.” And on context: “background knowledge is a tremendous facilitator of comprehension… the more one reads in one area, the more one learns about the area, and the easier one finds subsequent reading in the area.”

Translated to an eight-volume series: the first one costs, the second costs half, and from the third on the reader is at home. The characters are there, the world is there, the vocabulary repeats. The only new thing is the plot, which is what they came for.

The good objection: doesn’t reading the same thing over and over box them in? Krashen answers it: “deep reading in any topic will provide exposure to a tremendous amount of syntax and vocabulary that is used in other topics,” and readers “gradually expand their reading” on their own.

And if what they already finish is a run of graphic novels, that is narrow reading already working: what they read there carries more rare words per thousand than a children’s novel.

Is it bad to abandon a book?

Abandoning books is what people who read a lot do.

Somebody who reads twenty books a year starts thirty. Choosing, trying fifteen pages and putting it down is part of reading, and it is a skill worth learning early. The person who religiously finishes everything they start usually starts very little.

There is a practical reason to avoid forcing it too. In a survey of 1,755 British families, “more than eight in 10 children agree their favourite books –and the ones they are most likely to finish–are the ones they pick out themselves” (Scholastic, 2015). Forcing them through one they didn’t choose spends the little margin there is.

Where to start

This week, look at where the bookmark sits in the last one they dropped. If it’s on page twelve, read that stretch aloud tonight and stop where it gets good. If it’s halfway, go and get a shorter one.

And if it’s always anywhere at all, the book wasn’t the problem: the ten reasons are there.

Where these numbers come from

• Krashen, Stephen, “The Case for Narrow Reading,” Language Magazine 3(5), 17–19, 2004. The author describes the first-few-pages effect and narrow reading in the context of foreign language acquisition. Source
• Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, UK edition. A sample of 1,755 parents and children aged 6 to 17, fielded in summer 2015. Source

The screen went on one Tuesday so dinner could get finished. It worked, and it has been there every Tuesday since, and some Wednesdays.

That was a reasonable decision, and it is worth knowing what the data says before carrying it around.

A review of 58 studies with 480,000 participants found that total screen time tracked no relationship with academic performance. What did show up associated with poorer performance was watching television and playing video games. So the useful question stops being how many hours and becomes which screen.

This cuts across several of ten reasons someone won’t read, starting with the sixth: the hour.

How much screen time is too much?

There is an answer that rearranges the question.

A team at Universitat Jaume I in Castellón reviewed 58 studies from 23 countries with 480,000 participants aged 4 to 18. Thirty of them — 106,000 participants — went into a meta-analysis.

The headline result, in their words: “the amount of time spent on overall screen media use was not associated with academic performance”. The measured effect was −0.29, with a confidence interval that crosses zero: −0.65 to 0.08 (Adelantado-Renau et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2019).

And the second result, which travels with the first. Television viewing was inversely associated with composite scores —−0.19, from −0.29 to −0.09— and so was video game playing: −0.15, from −0.22 to −0.08.

What “associated” means. That the two things show up together in the data.

Television may take time away from other things. Houses with more television on may have other things going on too. Children having a harder time at school may reach for more television. The study measures the company the two keep, and leaves the direction open.

What can be done with that: stop counting hours and start looking at which ones.

Which screen actually competes with the book

Out of the distinction that study draws comes a table a household can use:

Screen	How it behaves next to a book
Television on in the background	The one most associated with poorer performance, and the one least decided on
Long, open-ended video game session	Associated as well. The session with no natural end is what eats the afternoon
Short game with an end of round	It finishes by itself, and leaves a gap afterwards
Short video on autoplay	No natural end. The format closest to background television
Screens with text: chat, subtitles, articles	That is reading, and it counts
Audiobook or reading on a screen	Reading, different bodywork

The row that changes a house most is the first: background television is the only one nobody chose to turn on. It is also the easiest to turn off, because nobody is watching it.

The screen that reads

Part of screen time is reading.

Subtitles on a video, the group chat, the wiki page about the game, the article about the team — that is all text somebody is decoding, at speed, by choice, for a reason they care about. The same thing applies as with graphic novels, which count as reading.

Which is worth saying out loud. The household count of “time reading” almost never includes any of it, and the household count of “time on screens” almost always does. The same twenty minutes get filed under the wrong column twice.

There is a practical consequence. A child who reads three thousand words of game wiki on a Saturday has done something the reading log will never show, and something that behaves, for vocabulary purposes, a good deal more like a book than like a cartoon.

What to change first, if anything

No stopwatch and no general negotiation. One concrete thing:

1. Turn off the background one. The television nobody is watching is the cheapest change and the least argued about.
2. Change one slot before touching the whole day. Half an hour — before dinner, say — with the whole house off screens. The adults’ ones included.
3. Prefer what ends by itself. A round with an end, an episode, a ten-minute video. What finishes leaves a gap; what runs on takes the afternoon.
4. Put the book where the screen was, in the same slot and the same distance from a hand. If it takes getting up to find it, it loses.
5. Offer the format that competes on equal terms. An audiobook in the car, or a comic on the table: what each format does and what evidence it has.

And a note on time, which is the resource underneath all of it: how much reading time is actually enough has its own piece, with the table from the study that produced the famous figure — here.

About the guilt

Somebody who puts on a screen so they can cook is solving a real problem with the tool at hand, at seven in the evening, after a whole day.

Competing with a device designed by large teams to hold attention is hard, and the result of that competition says little about a household. The finding above backs that up: across 480,000 participants, total screen time tracked no relationship with school performance.

What is within reach is smaller and more specific: one slot, one screen, and the book closer to a hand than the remote is.

Where to start

This week, turn off the background television and leave a book on the table where the remote usually sits. Nothing else. If somebody opens it by the third afternoon, you have your answer.

And if the screen turns out to be the excuse and the cause sits elsewhere, there are nine more reasons in the ten. They run from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.

Where these numbers come from

• Adelantado-Renau, Mireia, and coauthors, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, “Association Between Screen Media Use and Academic Performance Among Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” JAMA Pediatrics 173(11), 1058, 2019. DOI 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3176. Figures taken from the article abstract. Source

It’s eight thirty. The book has been open on the same page for ten minutes, there have been two trips to the bathroom and one negotiation about water. The reading log on the fridge wants twenty minutes, initialled, and you have not managed five in three days.

There is usually something specific underneath. And it can usually be checked.

When a seven-year-old won’t read, there is generally a cause you can look at: how they see, where they sit, which book they happened to be handed. Here are ten, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change, with what to check in each one and what checking it costs.

Where do I start if my child won’t read?

Start with the cheapest. The order of this table is deliberate: the first few can be ruled out in an afternoon, and if one of them is the answer, you have saved yourself months of pushing in the wrong direction.

#	What might be going on	What to check	What it costs
1	They can’t see the page	How close they hold it, squinting, headaches after reading	One eye exam
2	Decoding still takes everything they have	Listen to two pages read aloud	An afternoon
3	The book is wrong for them	Length, type size, how many pages	A library trip
4	The format is wrong	Try a graphic novel, a picture book, audio, large print	A loan
5	Something else may be going on	What their teacher sees in the classroom	A conversation
6	It’s the wrong time of day	Move the time for one week	Nothing
7	They read, just not that	What they read when nobody asks them to	Nothing
8	Reading feels like homework	A month without asking what they understood	Nothing
9	Nobody reads at home	Who reads in front of them, and when	Slow
10	There’s nowhere to read	Where they sit, and what light they have	A lamp

All ten are below. At the end is the number most families are carrying around: twenty minutes a day. It comes with its source, and with what its own authors said about it.

While you work out which one is yours, the story can keep reaching them another way. It helps to know how a story is built on the inside: with that in hand you can tell at a glance whether a book will hold them to the end.

What if they can’t see the page?

This one is first because it is the cheapest to rule out and the one almost nobody checks first.

In Philadelphia public schools, 18,974 children in grades K–5 were screened. Of those, 2,492 — 13.1% — had an uncorrected refractive error (Journal of AAPOS, 2018). One in eight, in a single district, with the class moving on regardless.

What it looks like at home:

• They hold the page very close, or squint at it.
• They tilt their head to look at the page.
• They skip lines, or read the same one twice.
• They complain of a headache right after reading.
• They follow the story when you read it, and lose it when they read it.

What to do: an eye exam rules it out in one visit. A school vision screening is a useful first pass and it is a screening, so a referral is where the answer actually comes from.

What if decoding still takes everything they have?

Sit next to them and ask them to read you two pages out loud. That is where you hear what silent reading hides.

If they read word by word, stopping to assemble each one, and reach the full stop having forgotten how the sentence began, the problem sits upstream of the story. All their effort is going into decoding, and there is nothing left over for finding out what happens. Asking them to enjoy it in that state is asking them to run while they are learning to walk.

The clearest signal is this one: they follow the story perfectly when you read it, and lose it when they read it. When that happens, what follows is to keep reading aloud while the mechanics settle, and let them read the short things: a caption, a street name, the shopping list.

What if the book is wrong for them?

A book fits when they can carry it. Three things decide that, and the age printed on the back is the least reliable of the three: how many pages it has, how much text sits on each one, and how often something happens.

Two hundred pages in the hands of someone who reads slowly communicate one thing: this is bigger than you. Forty pages, with three-page chapters, communicate the opposite.

Length also decides which shape of story suits them right now. Here are the parts of a story explained with an actual story, scene by scene, which is the fastest way to work out whether a book will hold.

And if they abandon books halfway through as a pattern, that is information: it is almost always length or pace, and it is fixed by changing the book.

What if it’s the format?

The chapter book with small type and tight margins is one format among many, and it happens to be the worst fit for someone who is just getting going.

Four that work: the graphic novel, the picture book where the image carries half the story, large print with more space between lines, and audio. Audio has a reputation for being cheating, and what it actually does is something else: it keeps the story alive while the mechanics of reading finish settling.

None of the four asks you to give anything up: the same title can arrive through the ears this week and through the eyes next month. And if you want to watch a story get built from nothing for one specific child, here is the guide to writing a story where your child is the one who lives it.

What if something else is going on?

Sometimes the difficulty holds after you have checked the eyes, the book and the format. Then it is time to ask, and asking is the whole of what belongs to a parent here.

One thing is worth knowing before reading any number anywhere. The prevalence of dyslexia “is better represented as a distribution that varies as a function of severity as opposed to any single-point estimate.” And published rates “range from less than 5 percent to 1 in 5 or 20 percent” (Wagner et al., Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2020). The same phenomenon, measured with different cut-offs, produces figures that quadruple. Which is why a single number in an article tells you very little.

What does belong to you: talk to their teacher, who sees them reading alongside thirty other people their age and has the comparison you are missing at home. That is where an evaluation comes from, if one is needed. Naming what you observe is yours to do; naming what it is belongs to someone trained to do it.

What if it’s the wrong time of day?

The hour decides more than it seems to. By eight thirty, school, homework, dinner and the bath have already happened. You are asking for the last of the day’s attention for the activity that demands the most of it.

The test takes a week: move the time. Saturday morning, or the fifteen minutes in the car before drop-off, or while you cook. If ten minutes appear at the new hour that were impossible at eight thirty, the hour was the answer.

What if they only read graphic novels?

Then they read.

Mexico’s national statistics institute counts comics, graphic novels and manga among the reading materials it measures, alongside books: 20.9% of literate people aged twelve and over read them in 2025 (INEGI, MOLEC 2025). The agency whose job is measuring how much a country reads settled this one already.

A graphic novel asks the reader to follow a sequence, hold characters in mind, infer what happened between two panels, and read tone off a drawn face. Someone who tells you they got through four volumes of something has a reading habit running, under a different cover.

What is worth checking here is the household definition of what counts as reading. When a child hears that their thing doesn’t count, they learn two things at once: that reading is boring, and that they are bad at it.

What if reading feels like homework?

For a lot of children, reading and being assessed arrived the same year and never separated. You read, and then someone asks what you understood, how many words per minute, what the lesson was. The log gets initialled. That is work, and work gets done under obligation.

The test runs a month and consists of taking something away: for four weeks, nobody asks what they understood. You read, you close the book, you turn off the light. If they ask for the book themselves by week four, assessment was the problem.

And if the ideas run out, there are twelve questions to ask a child that turn a reading into a conversation instead of a quiz.

What if nobody reads at home?

This is the uncomfortable one, and the one that has least to do with anyone’s willingness.

A house where nobody reads in front of anybody is a house where reading looks like something you do at school. And that is usually a matter of ten-hour shifts and libraries that close at six.

What fits is small and it works: read something in front of them for fifteen minutes. Anything, including the news on your phone, if you say out loud what you are reading. Let the scene exist. Watching somebody read is the oldest way there is of learning that reading is a thing people do.

What if there’s nowhere to read?

Look at where they sit to read. If the answer is the kitchen table with the television on, or bed in the dark with the hallway light, the room is asking them to give up.

It takes very little: a lamp that puts light on the page, somewhere their back is supported, and a shelf at their height with covers facing out instead of spines. A book you can see gets picked up. A spine among thirty spines, almost never.

Does twenty minutes a day actually hold up?

This number deserves its own section, because it hands out more guilt than any other.

The line that circulates — twenty minutes a day adds up to 1.8 million words a year — comes from a real study: Richard Anderson, Paul Wilson and Linda Fielding, Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School, 1988. One hundred and fifty-five fifth graders wrote down every day, for weeks, how they spent their time outside school.

What almost never gets passed along is which part of the table the number came from:

Percentile	Minutes of book reading per day	Words per year
98	65.0	4,358,000
90	21.2	1,823,000
50	4.6	282,000

Twenty minutes is the 90th percentile: the top ten percent of readers in that group, in 1988. Half of those children read for 4.6 minutes a day. The figure handed out as a minimum target was, at its source, the mark set by the most bookish tenth of 155 children.

And there is one more line, on the same page of the same study, written by the authors themselves: “The estimates of words read per year shown in Table 3 are unstable since the error in the constituent measures is magnified.” They put the warning in themselves. Thirty years of classroom posters left it out.

What to do with that: twenty minutes works as an orientation and fails as an exam. If five minutes happened this week, those five minutes count. And anyone who has gone three days without them is standing where half the children in the study that founded the rule were standing.

What can I do tonight?

Start with number one. This week, watch how close they hold the page and whether their head hurts afterwards — one visit rules it out. If that comes back clean, listen to them read two pages aloud and you will know whether decoding is taking everything. That is two evenings, and between them they rule out the two most common and least examined causes.

Meanwhile the story can keep arriving another way: you read it, they listen, or you write one together. If you want to start there, here is the guide to writing a story where your child is the one who lives it.

At Idunn we make books where a child’s name, family and way of moving through the world go inside the text. That is what we are building now, and we’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Where these numbers come from

• Mayro, Hark, Shiuey et al., “Prevalence of uncorrected refractive errors among school-age children in the School District of Philadelphia,” Journal of AAPOS, 2018. Source
• Wagner, Zirps, Edwards et al., “The Prevalence of Dyslexia: A New Approach to its Estimation,” Journal of Learning Disabilities 53(5), 2020. Source
• Anderson, Wilson and Fielding, “Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School,” Reading Research Quarterly 23(3), 1988. Source
• INEGI, Módulo sobre Lectura (MOLEC) 2025, press release 143/25, 18 November 2025. Source

Where to go next, depending on what's happening

Each reason above has its own page, with what the evidence says and what to try this week. They're in the same order as the causes: what's cheapest to rule out comes first.

What if it isn't the book?

Start with what's cheap to rule out. A vision check costs an afternoon and explains more cases than you'd think.

• Headaches after reading: what to check about their eyes

If the book is the problem

A book fits when they can carry it, and the age printed on the back cover isn't what decides that.

• Is this book too hard? Three things you can measure
• Do audiobooks count as reading? Four formats
• They only read graphic novels: one number settles it
• They start books and stop: where they stop matters

If the moment is the problem

How much time it actually takes, and how to read together without it turning into homework.

• How much reading time is actually enough?
• Reading together in five minutes, without the quiz
• Until what age to read aloud: there is a number
• Screens and reading: what 480,000 participants showed

If the house is the problem

Where they read, who reads in front of them, and what to do with their hands meanwhile.

• A reading nook built from what's already home
• Nobody reads in our house: what is actually measured
• Reading games for kids: seven worth playing tonight
• Reading exercises by grade, and what backs each one