UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 10
November 7, 1996
Reading right: Unidel Prof. named head of Dept. of Education

     Richard Venezky, Unidel Professor of Educational Studies,
was on leave in 1995 as a research fellow at the University of
Chicago, when he received an "out of the blue" telephone call
from the U.S. Department of Education asking him to help organize
a major, national reading and writing initiative.
     Reading scores for school children had fallen, and the
Department of Education was concerned and asked him to set up an
advisory committee by the following week.
     Venezky made some calls of his own to colleagues at
Columbia, Michigan, Stanford and other schools, and an advisory
committee was formed.
     The result was READ*WRITE*NOW, a community-based action
program that fosters reading and writing for children from
preschoolers through grade 6 and an Internet program for those in
grades 4 through 12. This past summer, Venezky was officially
appointed the program's national research director.
     "READ*WRITE*NOW puts research into practice and involves
families, schools and communities in an allout effort to help
students acquire the basic skills they need to succeed," Venezky
said.
     A practical, informal, multipronged approach gives parents,
volunteers, schools and community organizations the tools for
helping children learn basic reading and writing skills.
Activities include parent/child interaction, summer reading
programs, year-round school and library programs, as well as
World Wide Web programs for upper grades.
     As a component of the National Family Partnership for
Learning, READ*WRITE*NOW! plans and implements its programs in
cooperation with a wide range of corporate and non-profit
organizations, including the Girl Scouts, American Library
Association, Pizza Hut, Hadassah, National Urban League,
Scholastic and Time-Warner.
     "Research has shown that children from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds lose ground in their reading during the summer so
this is one of the areas we target," Venezky said.
     With the aid of researchers and teachers, Venezky created
user-friendly, informative booklets that give tips on how to
encourage reading and writing. All it takes, he wrote, is "a
child, a learning partner and a book."
     Play on Paper helps parents ready their children for
kindergarten, teaching them the alphabet and their letters, and
encouraging parents to read aloud to their children.
     Activities for Reading and Writing Fun is a guide for
parents of children from birth to grade 6, with suggestions of
appropriate activities that develop reading and writing skills
for each age and a suggested reading list. Both booklets also are
available in Spanish.
     The Partners Tutoring Program, a joint project of Hadassah
and the Department of Education, is designed to help volunteer
tutors who are being recruited nationally to assist with the
program.
     A comic book featuring Spiderman, with puzzles and word
exercises, is planned for the future.
     Through computers linked to the World Wide Web, older
students can access the Alphabet Superhighway
(http://www.ash.udel.edu), which provides a wealth of information
about science, people and cultures, sports, hobbies and other
topics and offers other on-line activities. In the future,
projects from other schools, on such topics as earthquakes or
immigration, can be accessed, and classrooms can be linked with
other classrooms in rural, suburban and urban areas.
     Other facets of READ* WRITE* NOW involve monitoring
indicators of reading and writing progress and developing
guidelines for schools to develop these skills.
     This is a grassroots program to coordinate and use the
resouces of the community to help children acquire and develop
reading and writing skills, Venezky said.
     In the future, READ*WRITE*NOW! may become the basis of
President Cliniton's plans for a multi-billion dollar national
tutoring effort, according to Venezky.
                                              -Sue Swyers Moncure