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Dear Parents/Guardians,
The teachers at Hammarskjold Middle School are committed to helping every boy and girl establish
good reading habits and a lifelong love of books. Children will leave school each day with one or
more books to be read at home. These books should be returned to school the next day. The goal is
at least a half an hour of home reading for every child every afternoon or evening.
Research shows that the highest achieving students are those who devote leisure time to reading.
Recently, the largest-ever international study found that the single most important predictor of
academic success is the amount of time children spend reading books. Additionally, one of the few
predictors of high achievement in math and science is the amount of time children devote to
pleasure reading.
Children read in order to become smarter about the world and how it works. They read to broaden
their vocabularies and to become better readers-faster and more fluent, purposeful, engaged,
critical, and satisfied. They read to stretch their imaginations, to escape to other lives, times, and
places. And they read to become good people-knowledgeable about and compassionate toward the
range of human experience.
There is no substitute for regular, sustained time with books. Please sit down with your child tonight
and talk about the best time and place for reading to happen at your house. We know that children
whose parents and teachers expect and encourage them to read are likely to grow up as happy,
skilled readers.
Please support your child’s reading efforts by asking about the books they are reading. Be ready to
provide help with unfamiliar words or concepts. Bear in mind that readers shouldn’t spend all their
time with just one kind of book. Children need experience with materials of varying degrees of
difficulty if they are to grow to independence as readers and understand all the things that reading is
good for. Please don’t ever consider your child too old to be read to. Children of every age cherish
the literary worlds that adults bring to life with our voices.
While we know it’s essential that children choose what they read, we also believe that your values
matter. If a book bothers you and you feel strongly about it, ask your child not to bring it home,
explain why, and talk with his or her teacher. The teachers have selected books for our libraries with
many criteria in mind, from classic literature to predictable language and story structures to award
winning illustrations to cross-cultural themes to contemporary social issues. We also want to
support you if you have concerns about a book choice your child has made.
We use our collections of children’s literature to teach reading and count on the books being
available to use each day. Please help us by checking each weekday morning to see that your child
has a book to return, or continue to read, that day at school. Reading is a priority activity at
Hammarskjold Middle School. We know that nothing is more important to the development of
children’s abilities in every subject area than reading and being read to. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for your support.
Ms. Rini
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