Reading By 8

Reading By 8 is a social education project dedicated to raising awareness that reading by age 8 is critical for individual students’ success and South Carolina’s overall competitiveness. On March 22 – 23, 2010, The Reading By 8 Project hosted prominent educator, David Boulton, at a conference in Greenville, South Carolina. Mr. Boulton, is President of ‘Learning Stewards’, a non-profit organization, and is the Director of the Children of the Code Project. Both organizations focus on empowering children with the ability to read. As a technologist, author, and public speaker, and self proclaimed learning-activist, David Boulton shares his knowledge of the science of learning, as well as ways everyone can benefit from “turning up” the level of learning in our own lives, families, schools, businesses, and communities. Mr. Boulton teaches that “shame” is the greatest barrier between a child’s ability to learn and his or her success in life. When it comes to the physical health of our children, we have and extensive amount of scientific measures to guide and teach us how to keep them healthy. However, when it comes to the mental and emotional health of our child’s learning process, we seem to be comparatively oblivious. David Boulton researches and explores the critical differences between “healthy” and “unhealthy” learning, and discusses how children can learn in ways that actually retard, diminish, or disable their learning capacities. Mr. Boulton’s research has shown that when this happens, it can result in “mind-shame”, which is the most wide-spread yet least understood learning disability of all. More American children suffer long-term harm from the process of learning to read than from abuse, accidents and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. David Boulton and the Reading By 8 project conducts a multidisciplinary learning journey into what is at stake and what is involved in learning to read. Reading By 8 combines the expertise and insights of over one hundred fifty field leading scientists, scholars, educators, government leaders, parents, and children. Reading By 8 teaches ways that parents and educators can learn to dispel the “mind-shame” and become better stewards of the health of their children’s learning. The Reading By 8 project emphasizes that, more than anything else within the scope of our influence, the future of us as individuals, and as a society, depends on our ability to learn. For more information on the Reading By 8 Project or the Children of the Code Project, please visit the following websites: www.ready4reading.org or www.childrenofthecode.org.