Russ on Reading

Most children these days are well versed in the adventures of  Shrek!  from the Dreamworks movie franchise and the Broadway musical, but Shr...

  There is a house A Napping House Where Everyone is Sleeping Thus begins one of the great read aloud books of all times, The Napping House,...

 The Australian Open Tennis tournament is going on right now, and while I watch and root for Serena Williams to defy advancing age and the e...

 Everyday is a good day for a read aloud, of course, but some books make better read alouds than others. Among my favorites are the trickste...

The holidays will be a bit different for all of this year, but one constant source of joy and solace for me is poetry. Here are a few that I...

I currently teach a graduate course at Rider University for prospective reading specialists. While the course focuses on the theory and rese...

This week I have been reading a new biography of my literary hero, John Steinbeck, Mad at the World: A Life  of John Steinbeck by William So...

Most young children love poetry, but when it comes to writing poetry they are often overwhelmed by the demands of rhythm and rhyme. Sense su...

I taught myself how to decode. No, I was not some precocious early reader who intuited how words work at three and was reading before enteri...

All of us try to provide best practice instruction to our students. Sometimes, though, in our enthusiasm to provide the children the instruc...

One of the ways that teachers are meeting the challenge of online instruction is through picture books and the read aloud. This is a good id...

Three things I read this morning came together in what might be considered a perfect storm of insight. First, I read for one hour the book I...

Knowing our history, the good and the bad, is the first step, I want my children to love the country they live in, but I also want them to b...

Many young readers hit a wall when their reading demands that they decode longer and longer words. Research has shown that instruction in mo...