The educational achievement disparity between whites and Asians and African-Americans and Hispanics is growing across social class lines. There is much evidence to suggest that a major reason for this disparity is that the parents of working class and lower income kids are divorced from the educational experience.

I organize parents and kids, during evenings and weekends, to play with reading and visualizing by encouraging them to crawl into dramatic characters, and make the words of dramas, stories, and poems their own. All learning begins with play. Basically, I gather about 30 parents and children, divide them into the chapters of, for example, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and have each small group present their chapter, as a play, or as a dance, or as a mime. People of all ages can participate, and parents and kids don’t have to know how to read, or read well, or have any experience performing to participate enjoyably. No audience is encouraged other than the participants so as to have an emotionally safe environment. Its purpose is to have fun and experience mental visualization and expression. This can be done with stories, plays and poetry. It encourages reading aloud as a recreational activity, as well as visualization, intimacy, cohesion, and cooperation. Especially for troubled families, crawling into literary characters in plays and stories can help them understand and articulate emotional conflicts.

Conventional wisdom believes that the single most important influence on a child's achievement is the teacher. I am suggesting that for every child their parent is their most important role model. If kids see their parents having fun giving expression to stories, plays and poems, it will give kids a model for an additional way for them to play with reading. Conventional wisdom tells us that the purpose of reading is to acquire information. I am suggesting that the purpose of reading is to transport the reader into the world created by the author. This can be done more effectively if kids and parents read aloud together as teams. Parents and kids reading aloud together is simple and achievable, and can motivate parents and kids to visualize everything from the expression of
dialogue to simple costumes. It can encourage parents and young people to work as teams in achieving goals, as well as to discover the intimacy and articulation of literary characters.