D.E.A.R. - Drop Everything and Read
D.E.A.R. stands for "Drop Everything and Read," a national celebration of reading designed to remind families to make reading a priority activity in their lives. This day is celebrated every year on April 12th for author Beverly Cleary’s birthday. D.E.A.R. time was a reading practice featured in the Ramona Quimby books.
Background
The concept behind D.E.A.R. Day and Month grew out of a passage in the second chapter of Beverly Cleary’s book Ramona Quimby, Age 8. Published in 1981, the book was the sixth in the Ramona series. Ramona was one of the award-winning author’s most popular characters. In it, Ramona’s teacher, Mrs. Whaley, initiates “Sustained Silent Reading Time.” Ramona, who loves to read, quickly seizes on Drop Everything and Read time as a favorite pastime. She even uses it as a “homework assignment” to get time away from her neighbor Howie’s pesky little sister, Willa Jean.
Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Oregon. She and her parents lived on a farm in a town so small it did not have a library. Cleary’s mother arranged to borrow books through a state library and set up a small library in a room above the town’s bank. Clearly initially struggled with reading, but she improved by third grade and spent a great deal of time reading. However, she found the stories in the books were often disappointing because the characters were not children growing up poor in small towns like her.
After she completed a degree in librarianship from the University of Washington, she worked as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington. There, she was confronted by a young boy who demanded to know where the books were that were about kids like him. Remembering her own childhood disappointment in the storylines in children’s books, Cleary began making up her own stories. She married, raised two children, and worked in libraries and the children’s department of bookstores. In 1950, she published her first children’s book, Henry Higgins. It became the first of thirty-nine children’s books she wrote before her death in 2021.
Throughout much of her career as an author, Cleary insisted on answering her own fan mail, which included countless letters from children. She said that it helped her understand what was important to children. Some of those children wrote about their own quiet reading time, or D.E.A.R. time, in school. Cleary credited this for her decision to have Ramona have D.E.A.R. time, thereby touching off a legacy of encouraging children to read on their own and with their parents.
