Have you thought about making any New Year’s Resolutions for 2011? Here is a factoid to consider.
English-speaking mothers who begin reading to their children at a very early age have toddlers with greater language comprehension, larger, more expressive vocabularies and higher cognitive scores by the age of 2. Meanwhile, Spanish-speaking mothers who read to their children every day have 3-year-olds with greater language and cognitive development than those who aren’t read to. These results, based on research from researchers at the universities of Nebraska-Lincoln, Iowa State, New York, Columbia and Harvard, and from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., are published in the July/August 2006 issue of the journal Child Development.
Here’s to a healthy, prosperous and literacy rich new year!
Yes! Early reading aloud is key, and if you can squeeze in another language with picture books…even better. Our kids grew up in Japan, and although I am not a native speaker, my Japanese was good enough to read them LOTS of easy, fun stories with great pictures. Buying so many books can get pricey so I swapped English and Japanese books with American/Brit/Aussie/Japanese friends and read them aloud to my kids, time after time. Sometimes I’d take a book in English that they had heard so many times that they knew it by heart – and read it to them in Japanese (okay, I may not have achieved a perfectly accurate translation every time but it was close enough!) – and sometimes I’d do the reverse. Terrific for vocab and conceptualizing in two languages.
Both thumbs up on this idea!
Reading aloud to children for 20 minutes a day exposes them to over one million words in a year. What a tremendouse payoff for a small price. Hats off to all who read to children.