The Reading Environment : How Adults Help Children Enjoy Books

"Reading is a provocative act; it makes things happen."

"It is a fact of our psychological make-up that we cannot read anything without experiencing some kind of response."

"If we are forced to read as a duty, expecting no delight, we are likely to find it a boring business."

"We cannot easily read for ourselves what we haven't heard said."

"Some people say they don't like reading stories, but I've never come across anyone who doesn't like hearing one."

With such forthright statements Aidan Chambers ensures that The Reading Environment will make things happen about the ways reading is presented in schools.



For Chambers, reading is a life-enhancing occupation, not a pastime. Drawing memorably on his own experience as a teacher and a reader, he offers a multitude of stimulating ideas for opening the rewards of thoughtful reading to all children.



Concerned with the practical aspects of creating an environment that supports children as they become readers, he provides suggestions on school book fairs and displays, reading areas, author visits, and book selection. But having enabled children to become readers is only part of the issue, and he also addresses ways of keeping track of children's reading and helping them develop responses to what they read.



Concise and elegantly written, The Reading Environment will be a valuable book for preservice and inservice teachers, and its distinctive blend of reflective and active comment make it an enlightening reminder to parents, media specialists, and librarians. Tell Children, Reading, and Talk is the companion volume to The Reading Environment.

Aidan Chambers' best known books are the children's novel The Present Takers and his young adult fiction that includes Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, and The Toll Bridge. He lectures on children's literature for teachers and for several years wrote the "Letter from England" column for The Horn Book.

With his wife Nancy he founded The Thimble Press in 1969, which has published professional books in education as well as the critical journal Signal: Approaches to Children's Books. A recipient of numerous awards, in 1986 he gave the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture, sponsored by the Association for Library Service to Children. Aidan and Nancy Chambers live in the Cotswold region of England.