The Benefits of Reading to Children

I am sure you all know that reading to your children is beneficial, but I really enjoyed this piece in a book that I just purchased, so I wanted to share it with you!

 Excerpt from What Should I Read Aloud by Nancy A. Anderson

In addition to building a bond between parents and children, daily reading to youngsters is the single most important activity for building knowledge required for eventual success in learning to read (Anderson, Hiebert, & Wilkinson, 1985). Moreover, parents should continue to read to their children after they start school until they say they want to read on their own (or read to you).


Learning to read is a process that begins at birth when children first start to recognize speech sounds and the meanings the sounds represent.  Later, children associate these sounds with the letters and letter clusters within words. 


Children can acquire concepts, ideas, story and text structures, syntax, vocabulary, and pleasure from listening to and reading books. Each book helps children enlarge their parameters as they vicariously learn about the world and add new words to their listening, speaking, and reading vocabularies. Teachers often tell me how reading to children stimulates their imaginations and stretches their attention spans, and parents and other caregivers often remark on how it nourishes children's emotional development and strengthens  bonds between children and adults. 


When a young child sits in an adult's lap and they look at a picture book together  (called lap reading), the adult can talk about things they read and ask questions to elicit the child's oral language development. Together the child and adult can point to and discuss the illustrations, which provide rich clues to the meaning of words. When lap reading a familiar book, occasionally encourage children to focus on the printed words. 


One way to do this is to encourage children to join in on parts they recognize or remember. Rhyming text lends itself especially well to this strategy because it is predictable. Adults can facilitate this activity if they pause at the end of a sentence or line and allow children to finish it. If adults point under each word as children say them, this helps children grasp the concept of word--that written word is a string of letters bounded by spaces. Once children can match spoken words to their written counterparts, they have made an important discovery called speech-to-print match, and most children will then begin to learn to read many of these words by sight.