Event date: July 17th, 2009 11:00 AM
Event location: Central Library, 801 S.W. 10th
Check out Multnomah County Library's Guys Read page for booklists and other branch libraries offering Guys Read clubs.
Why a reading club for guys?A lot of boys are having trouble reading.
- The U.S. Department of Education reading tests for the last 30 years show boys scoring worse than girls in every age group, every year.
- Eighth grade boys are 50 percent more likely to be held back than girls.
- Two-thirds of Special Education Students in high school are boys.
- Overall college enrollment is higher for girls than boys.
Why might boys be having trouble?
- Biologically, boys are slower to develop than girls and often struggle with reading and writing skills early on.
- The action-oriented, competitive learning style of many boys works against them learning to read and write
- Many books boys are asked to read don't appeal to them. They aren't motivated to want to read.
- As a society, we teach boys to suppress feelings. Boys often don't feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction.
Adapted from GUYS READ (www.guysread.org) - a nonprofit literacy initiative founded by Jon Scieszka, and is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
