Reading aloud to your child
The benefits of reading aloud to your kids : NPR
The benefits of reading aloud to your kids It's not always easy to convince kids that reading isn't a chore. But reading aloud can help. Here are a few ways to help you find joy — and value — in reading aloud as a family.
How reading aloud can help you bond with your kids and make them better readers
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We've all heard about the benefits of learning to read quietly and independently. A big part of learning at school is all about reading, but it's not always easy to find time for more reading at home.
Families have busy schedules filled with after-school activities and homework. Plus — let's be honest — with all the tech at kids' fingertips and school days already filled with required reading, it can be hard convincing kids that reading isn't a chore.
But Keisha Siriboe says there is a way, and it doesn't have to be independent or quiet! Her solution: reading aloud as a family.
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Siriboe is a Baltimore-based early childhood literacy consultant with a Ph.D. in early childhood education. She has researched education strategies and student leadership development all over the world and says reading aloud can help people with stress management, hope and resilience.
Reading aloud is the best bang for your buck, Siriboe says, adding that she hasn't seen anything yet that gives a higher return on investment.
The emotional benefits of reading aloud
Reading with your child is a practice that creates space for deeper independent learning and exploring.
It doesn't matter if it's a traditional book, graphic novel, non-fiction or historical fiction, it all counts. What matters most is taking the time to dive deeper.
Use reading aloud to start conversations that can help your child deal with the now of wherever we are in the world. It could lead to something you may not have expected. For example, when it comes to anxiety and worry, a caregiver could use a picture book that specifically deals with that topic and turn that into an opportunity for a child to share what worries they are carrying.
Reading aloud is one of the few spaces that checks all the boxes in terms of social, emotional and mental health. For Siriboe, the simple act of sharing your love of reading with your child is bigger than just literacy. It's another expression of love and a tool for helping kids navigate the world.
Talk, read, play and sing
There's more to reading with your kids than just the words on the page. Before you dive into reading, try talking with them about the story or topic.
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There's more to reading with your kids than just the words on the page. Before you dive into reading, try talking with them about the story or topic.
miniseries/Getty Images
Siriboe likes to break down the global possibilities of reading into four key components:
Talk. She says take a moment to talk about the subject matter of the book, comic or recipe with your kids. If the book you're going to read is about wellness or meditation, you may want to share some of your favorite breathing exercises or ask your kiddo what coping skills they may have learned at school.
The next component is to read. Start looking at the words, finding the characters, settings and storyline of the book. Explore how the characters in the story engage with each other and their environment.
Then play. Perhaps you and your child want to role-play some scenarios of what the character is experiencing in the real world or explore what it would be like to live inside the character's world.
The last thing is to sing. Come up with your own song or use some online resources to find some silly songs that can help you bring a story to life. Siriboe emphasizes that this whole experience should be filled with joy and laughter.
The goal is to go past the idea of phonetics alone and really think about bonding with your child. That may mean the child gets to lead instead of the adult. At the end of the day, both the caregiver and child should hopefully be having fun.
The benefits of reading aloud for neurodiverse learners
It's important to remember that every child learns differently.
Siriboe says parents may need to think outside the pages of a book to connect and help a neurodiverse child thrive. Allowing kids who learn differently opportunities to experience success within literacy can help build confidence and spark that fire for reading and storytelling.
Every child needs to discover what they like and who they are in the world of a story. If you have a child who loves to paint, you can take them to the museum and have them write down the artists that mean the most to them. Siriboe says the next step is to go to a local library and find books about the art that inspires them and give them a chance to create their version of that art.
Helping kids who may not take to reading
Not everyone takes to reading right away, and many kids struggle. Siriboe says parents need to know that it is probably safe to assume that a kid who doesn't love reading has probably had a negative experience.
The first thing parents can do is help their kiddo shift their perspective.
She says helping kids move from a fixed mindset about what they think their reading ability is into a growth mindset is a good starting place.
Help reassure your kid that they may not be the great reader they aspire to be yet, but they absolutely can do this. One way to do this is to incorporate aural storytelling into the fold. Invite your child to create a story that you, the adult, are willing to write down or help them use a computer or smartphone app that can do it for them while they speak. Siriboe says this helps kids to form a bridge from the inconceivable to the I can do this!
Take the step to start
It's not about how well you read or even what you read. What Siriboe wants families everywhere to know is the act of starting to read aloud and making it part of your routine for 15 minutes a day is what matters most.
Listen to the audio version of this story at the top of this page for more tips from Keisha Siriboe and get insights into what she has learned in her research.
The audio portion of this episode was produced by Andee Tagle, with engineering support from Patrick Murray.
We'd love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected]. Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.
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Reading with Your Child | Reading Rockets
By: Bernice Cullinan, Brod Bagert
There is no more important activity for preparing your child to succeed as a reader than reading aloud together. Fill your story times with a variety of books. Be consistent, be patient, and watch the magic work.
It's no secret that activities at home are an important supplement to the classroom, but there's more to it than that. There are things that parents can give children at home that the classrooms cannot give.
Start young and stay with it
At just a few months of age, an infant can look at pictures, listen to your voice, and point to objects on cardboard pages.
Guide your child by pointing to the pictures, and say the names of the various objects. By drawing attention to pictures and associating the words with both pictures and the real-world objects, your child will learn the importance of language.
Children learn to love the sound of language before they even notice the existence of printed words on a page. Reading books aloud to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. When the rhythm and melody of language become a part of a child's life, learning to read will be as natural as learning to walk and talk.
Even after children learn to read by themselves, it's still important for you to read aloud together. By reading stories that are on their interest level, but beyond their reading level, you can stretch young readers' understanding and motivate them to improve their skills.
It’s part of life
Although the life of a parent is often hectic, you should try to read with your child at least once a day at a regularly scheduled time.
But don't be discouraged if you skip a day or don't always keep to your schedule. Just read to your child as often as you possibly can.
If you have more than one child, try to spend some time reading alone with each child, especially if they're more than two years apart. However, it's also fine to read to children at different stages and ages at the same time. Most children enjoy listening to many types of stories. When stories are complex, children can still get the idea and can be encouraged to ask questions. When stories are easy or familiar, youngsters enjoy these "old friends" and may even help in the reading.
Taking the time to read with your children on a regular basis sends an important message: Reading is worthwhile.
One more time
You may go through a period when your child favors one book and wants it read night after night. It is not unusual for children to favor a particular story, and this can be boring for parents. Keep in mind, however, that a favorite story may speak to your child's interests or emotional needs.
Be patient. Continue to expose your children to a wealth of books and eventually they will be ready for more stories.
Talking about stories
It's often a good idea to talk about a story you are reading, but you need not feel compelled to talk about every story. Good stories will encourage a love for reading, with or without conversation. And sometimes children need time to think about stories they have read. A day or so later, don't be surprised if your child mentions something from a story you've read together.
Remember when you were very young
It will help, however, if we open our eyes to some things adult readers tend to take for granted. It's easier to be patient when we remember how much children do not know. Here are a few concepts we adults know so well we forget sometimes we ever learned them.
- There's a difference between words and pictures. Point to the print as you read aloud.
- Words on a page have meaning, and that is what we learn to read.
- Words go across the page from left to right. Follow with your finger as you read.
- Words on a page are made up of letters and are separated by a space.
- Each letter has at least two forms: one for capital letters and and one for small letters.
These are examples of hieroglyphics.
Imagine how you would feel if you were trying to interpret a book full of such symbols. That's how young readers feel. But, a little patience (maybe by turning it into a puzzle you can solve together) is certain to build confidence.
Advertise the joy of reading!
Our goal is to motivate children to want to read so they will practice reading independently and, thus, become fluent readers. That happens when children enjoy reading. We parents can do for reading what fast food chains do for hamburgers? ADVERTISE! And we advertise by reading great stories and poems to children.
We can help our children find the tools they need to succeed in life.
Having access to information through the printed word is an absolute necessity. Knowledge is power, and books are full of it. But reading is more than just a practical tool. Through books we can enrich our minds; we can also relax and enjoy some precious leisure moments.
With your help, your children can begin a lifelong relationship with the printed word, so they grow into adults who read easily and frequently whether for business, knowledge, or pleasure.
7 reasons why reading aloud is the best thing you can do for your child
The first week of March is celebrated as Reading Aloud Day around the world. Our regular author Inna Pribora armed herself with scientific data and now explains why a fairly simple ritual of reading a bedtime story will allow your child to become much smarter, kinder and smarter. What else is needed?
There are many ways to read: on the subway from the phone, with a flashlight under the covers, by syllables in the classroom. But one of the best is to read aloud to a child.
The benefits are not immediately apparent, especially if you are asked for the 18th time to recite the words of the monster in the voice of the monster (it somehow works out later). But scientists are in a hurry with consolation: it is really valuable for both mental and social-emotional development of a person.
For children of past generations, the book was the only window to the world, to exotic countries, to distant galaxies, now they have many windows - just make sure to close them. Well, look to see if any nastiness got in there. And any book today has cheaper and noisier competitors: quick ways to get information, entertainment that requires the inclusion of not an older family member, but only a computer.
And about reading aloud, there is a reasonable objection from tired parents of older children: “But he already knows how to read by himself! Why will I do this? Let him practice the skill." This point of view is popular. Adults read to preschoolers more actively, but already in elementary school, dads and moms leave this activity, since little Filipok seems to have already learned the letters.
In fact, a child's level of reading with the eyes often lags behind his level of understanding of a text by ear. Let's say, on his own, he is ready to read only stories about Kwak and Toad, and in your performance, he delves into The Hobbit and The Secret Garden. This also makes sense. However, about everything in order.
So, why is it still worth continuing to do what people did before the era of Zuckerberg, in the era of Gutenberg - to read aloud.
1. Cognitive abilities
Reading to a child is one of the easiest ways to make him smarter. To understand how this works, you can start from verbal skills. First of all, children to whom reading is heard hear complex speech. Yes, texts about witches and dancing penguins are more complex vocabulary compared to everyday expressions “eat porridge, don’t put porridge in your hat.”
According to a recent Ohio State University study, as early as five years of age, the word gap between reading and non-reading children is hundreds of thousands of language units.
Scientists are scary when they say that the figure is approaching one and a half million, while they compare children who were not read at all, and children who were read five books a day. It sounds serious, if you do not take into account that a volume for three-year-olds can consist of two or three sentences and a bunch of joyful pictures. Apparently, the secret is not in quantity, but in the very fact of reading.
Simultaneously, by waving measuring devices, scientists prove that the number of words in a child's vocabulary is strongly correlated with the level of intelligence. The further, the greater the gap, because those hundreds of thousands of words with which you diligently supplied the child affect academic performance, which in elementary school consists precisely of the ability to read and understand what is read. Listening, writing and speaking skills, phonemic hearing and the level of understanding of what the teacher mumbles at the blackboard - all this depends on whether the child in the family has heard complex sentences.
However, this is obvious.
Impossible from the baby nursery rhyme "into the hole - boom!" move on to understanding the text from the textbook. Between these events, there must be a road paved with children's books
Researchers are not shy about putting language in the headlines of scientific papers that directly links children's reading and IQ: for example, a 2014 paper, a multivariate analysis of twins from 6 to 17 years old, so and is called - "Learning to read improves intelligence?", And only scientific modesty forced experts to put a question mark at the end of the sentence.
Note that there is no great distinction to be made between reading to a child as such and learning to read. Because the second just starts with the fact that dad sits down and shows how everything works in reality: you sit on the sofa, run your finger along the page and you are transported straight to the dragon.
2. Empathy, understanding of others
The beauty of books is not only in intellectual experiences, but also in emotional ones.
Reading helps the child to gain experience that is not necessary to face in real life. Feeling that a dragon that has just been approached unarmed is hungry and that the Holy Grail has been ripped out from under your nose is incredibly enriching. The ability to take the point of view of another, understanding his motives, his mental model develops while you are reading the story of an orphan to a child.
There is also enough research here: in Cambridge, for example, they found out that fiction is exactly the means that helps young people to pump this secret muscle - the ability to sympathize and understand others. And Dutch scientists published a work proving that young lovers of magical worlds are more sensitive and tolerant of others. Thanks to reading Harry Potter, children from primary and secondary schools were able to get rid of prejudice towards marginalized groups: at some point, you understand that "Mudbloods" and "immigrants" are a little difference.
In general, if we talk about the current fashionable emotional intelligence, then reading fiction will give a hundred points to many special techniques.
Here is a special vocabulary for talking about feelings, and searching for oneself, and empathy with others.
3. Imaginative thinking
It's great that today you can get visual evidence: you are reading to a child for a reason. Indeed, sometimes it becomes insulting: you read, but the person does not listen, as if you are not reading a fairy tale, but the washing machine is buzzing.
Excited American researchers studied children's brains with MRI scans as they listened to recorded stories and background noises. It turned out that the effect is completely different.
During reading, the brain is highly active in those parts that are associated with narrative understanding and visual images the more actively the brain responded to the story. Well, yes, studies have been conducted on young children - from three to five, but this does not mean at all that the benefits of reading disappear in older listeners.
If you are talking about a unicorn dancing on the roof of a garage, the person needs to turn on their imagination: imagine the garage, understand where its roof is, mentally draw a unicorn and even create a certain pattern of its dance.
The brain has something to get excited about.
4. Social development, attention management
Many parents and specialists tell how spoiled children are today: attention difficulties, hyperactivity, clip thinking. Although, perhaps, instead of being nervous, we could just pick up a book. There is scientific evidence that shows the beneficial effects of parental reading on children's behavior. It helps reduce the risk of developing attention problems and hyperactivity.
Experts don't quite understand why this works, but they have a few suggestions. For example, there is a version that reading together makes everyone “happier” and children need to be less mischievous in order to attract the attention of an adult. And he, in turn, gets more joy from interaction, especially when the book has a good ending. Another option: children develop better in the socio-emotional sphere, because they receive certain models of behavior in difficult situations, tools, even in the form of new vocabulary, for solving their problems.
Understanding that you weren’t the only one who stamped your feet today and it’s not only hard for you to sit at the opera helps the child control his behavior.
5. Improving memory
Listening to a parent who occasionally tries to fall asleep reads about adventures is hard work. Not only because you need to wake someone up all the time, but also because it is important to keep in mind all the bad characters that are dangerous, all possible escape routes (to suggest if anything), and the events of the previous eight volumes. And this work is not in vain for the child.
In general, the relationship between memory and reading aloud has been documented in people who themselves read aloud. There is reason to believe that this affects the memory of listeners no less positively.
6. Stress Relief
If you don't choose the "Blooliest Murders of the Century" collection, then reading might well help you relax. This is what the studies of British neuropsychologists tell us.
Experiments, however, were carried out on adults, but there is no reason to believe that this will affect children in any fundamentally different way.
It turned out that after just six minutes of reading, the subjects’ heart rate slowed down, muscle tension decreased, and (it’s not written about, but I would like to think) they stopped jerking their legs. Reading relaxed people much more effectively than walking in the fresh air or listening to their favorite songs.
7. It's nice
Yes, of all the activities we can do for children, reading is one of the most wonderful. It captivates. Moves us in space and time. Allows you to stop and chat, laugh and be sad, hug or stand on your hands. Well, besides, you are in the process of working as a live advertisement for reading.
Oh yes, there is no point here that the book is a source of knowledge. But what is knowledge next to other pluses, especially the ability to stand on your hands?
Read aloud to your child: a guide for parents
Parents today ask themselves: is it important to read aloud to children? Maybe it's enough to turn on a good fairy tale for a child on a tablet? There the pictures are interactive, and the voice of the narrator is pleasant, and the diction is noticeably clearer than ours.
..
To answer this question, you need to know one important fact from psychology: the parental voice creates a situation of the author's personal appeal to the baby. Personal appeal predetermine the possibility of speech development.
Therefore, speech sounding from a TV set or a computer can entertain a baby, but nothing more. It does not affect the speech development of the baby. Such listening will be effective for an older child who has already “developed” a speech space.
In addition, there are at least 10 other reasons why we should read aloud to our children:
1. Vocabulary. Reading aloud forms children's speech, expands vocabulary. Studies have shown that the more words parents use when talking to an 8-month-old baby, the more voluminous his vocabulary will be at the age of three. There are many words in books that a child is unlikely to meet in oral speech. There are 50% more rare words in children's books than watching TV! Book speech is more complex than oral speech, it is always distinguished by more complex grammatical constructions, and the grammar of the language reflects the ways of human thinking.
Therefore, reading aloud to children at any age is an effective mechanism for development.
2. Fantasy. Reading develops fantasy: the child does not see what the author describes, he imagines it. Reading aloud shows your child how to use their imagination.
3. Proximity. Reading aloud is also a precious time for a child, spent together with mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. Children love to sit in the arms of mom or dad when they read books to them aloud! Through this closeness, a close bond develops between parents and children.
4. Authority, values and outlook. When you read aloud, you increase self-respect, develop motivation for actions based on certain values. Sometimes only you can explain to the child why the hero did this. Parents, reading aloud, can tell the baby about incomprehensible things, thereby developing his horizons.
5. Comfort. Reading aloud calms the child. Too active child, cannot concentrate on a book.
You may not have found the right book for your baby yet. Use the moments when the child behaves more calmly. Early in the morning, in the afternoon before bedtime or in the evening after brushing your teeth, is a good time to read aloud. Reading aloud is a proven tactic for helping kids cope with stress.
6. Love of reading. Children who are read aloud during their first years of life and who live surrounded by books are much more likely to engage in reading later in life. The child learns that reading is important and at the same time pleasant and fun. The care and attention shown by parents during reading aloud helps the baby develop a positive attitude towards books.
7. Development of motor skills. The child learns how to use a book, how to hold it, how to turn pages - fine motor skills develop.
8. Sensual pleasure.
A good children's book has fun illustrations, soft-touch paper, and the new book smells good too.
All this works to ensure that the child enjoys the process of reading together.
9. Listening skill. Reading aloud teaches the child to listen carefully. Before you know it, this skill will come in handy in school very quickly.
10. The tenth reason can be attributed to the most important. Remember how your mom or dad read your favorite book to you at night. Such sometimes fragmentary, but warm and bright moments of childhood add up to a picture that warms us in difficult moments throughout our lives. Now it is our duty as parents to leave the same memories in our children that will protect and warm them in adulthood.
We recommend reading:
1 . Karpovskaya, E. Bedtime stories / E. Karpovskaya // Happy parents. - 2015. - No. 6. - S. 82-85.
2. Family reading circle: rec. bibliography index / MGOUNB; [comp. Yu. V. Sosipatrova, T. V. Volozhanina]. - Murmansk: MGOUNB, 2007. - 170 p.
