Why Read to Children?
The Benefits of Reading to Children
Most educators are aware of the many advantages of reading to children, and more and more parents are also becoming aware of this fact. In recent years, numerous studies have found the distinct benefits of early reading for young children, and the implications last well into school and later on in life. In our article here, we're going to explore some of the benefits and discuss why you should read to your children. We'll also discuss the relationship between reading to kids and the links to reading skill acquisition.
No doubt, reading is arguably one of the most important skills one must master to achieve success in school and in life. Almost every facet of our lives involve reading in one form or another - be it reading road signs, product labels, books and magazines, or a restaurant menu.More importantly, reading is a prerequisite skill that children must master to do well in school. After all, almost every single subject mater involves reading. As important as reading is, why is it that such a large portion of young students read so poorly? Did you know that one third (34%) of all grade 4 students cannot achieve the lowest basic level of reading proficiency?
As concerned parents, our natural instinct is to do our best to help our kids become better readers, and common sense dictates that we should start reading to our children at a young age. The act of reading serves to enhance the achievement differences between children. Kids who are exposes to more literacy and reading experiences early in life are able to take better advantage of educational opportunities later on as they enter school. Reading also makes you smarter, and can even help compensate for modest levels of cognitive ability in kids. [Cunningham, Stannovich]
Why Read to Babies?
What is the point of reading to babies? Some might wonder. Reading aloud has many developmental benefits, and early reading experiences provide numerous advantages. Reading to your baby facilitates language and cognitive development and helps with language acquisition of the child. It also provides invaluable bonding experiences between the parent and the child providing many social and emotional benefits. It has been well documented that reading to kids helps increase their vocabulary growth and also enhances children's understanding of language and literature. Another key advantage of early reading experiences is that this encourages the child to engage in their own reading experiences and help them acquire a natural affinity to reading.
To share our family's story with you, we have 3 kids - 3rd baby is due in 3 months, as at the time of this writing. We read nightly to all of our children starting at the time they were babies. With our first child, we taught her to read at 2 years 11 months old, and by the time she was 4 years 2 months old, she was able to read at a grade 3 level (at 70th percentile). With our second child, we also did nightly reading session with him, and applied some new knowledge and experiences we learned with our first child, and he had developed superb phonemic awareness skills at a little over 1.5 years old. He also learned to read before turning 3 years old. There's every reason to believe that we'll be able to achieve the same thing with our 3rd child, after he or she is born of course.
How did we do it? How is it possible to help a toddler learn to read at just 2 years old, and read better than most grade 3 students by age 4? Does reading to kids help them learn how to read?
Yes and no.
It is a common belief that one of the primary advantages of reading to children is that it helps them learn to read. There are studies that have found some correlation between reading to children and their reading skill acquisition. However, other studies have found that reading aloud is a relatively weak predictor of reading ability when compared with other far more important factors such as phonemic awareness. So while reading to kids convey numerous benefits for reading skill development, it's still a relatively weak predictor. The fact of the matter is, it has been proven that the strongest predictor and factor to successful reading skill acquisition is through the development of phonemic awareness.
In fact, we can attest to this through our own experiences with our children. With our first child, we made a great effort to help her develop phonemic awareness skills while teaching her to read using our own step-by-step reading program. After about 11 weeks, she had made fantastic progress. As mentioned earlier, our 2nd child developed excellent phonemic awareness skills at just a little over 1.5 years old, and when we started teaching him to read around 2.6 years old, the progress was faster and easier - simply because he had already developed phonemic awareness. The key takeaway from this is that helping a child develop phonemic awareness is absolutely essential in helping them develop reading fluency and literacy skills. To learn more about the super simple reading program we use to teach our children, click below:
>> Click here to teach your child to read using a simple, effective, step-by-step program.
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