FROM THE DESK OF THE SUPERINTENDENT
by Ed Hawks
January 27, 2008
FEBRUARY 2008 DISTRICT DISPATCH
Blame it on working parents who are too tired at the end of the day or on the potent allure of television or video games. Whatever the cause, it seems that the bedtime story may be losing its hold on American family life according to a story printed recently in the Kansas City Star. If so, it is more than just the loss of a long-standing and comforting custom. Researchers and child-development specialists say that reduced rates of shared reading time can hurt family cohesion, stymie creative development in younger children, and drag down academic achievement.
“Reading Across the Nation,” a recently released study, found that just under half of the parents surveyed said that they or other family members read every day to their newborn to five-year-old children. Reading habits vary with the age of the children. Survey respondents indicated that they read the least to children younger than one, the most to three-year-olds, and then cut back as their children turn four or five. “I would encourage parents to keep reading to their four and five-year-old children,” notes one of the study’s lead authors, Shirley Russ. Russ, an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at UCLA, goes on to say: “Parents can read to children with much richer language than children are initially capable of reading to themselves. Also, there is a good deal of evidence which points to the conclusion that reading to young children helps prepare them for school.”
While nearly any kind of reading aloud offers some benefit, Russ points out that child-development specialists are increasingly recognizing the benefit of “dialogic reading.” Such reading involves bringing children more actively into the process by having them point to certain items in the pictures, asking them questions about what might be coming up next in the story, or encouraging them to think about how the book might relate to their own lives. “This gets the children to start thinking for themselves and relating what is being read to them to their own lives,” says Russ. “These skills stand them in good stead when they enter the school system.”
It is hardly surprising that hearing the written word helps with the development of literacy in preschoolers. However, the study also notes that infants also benefit from having parents or other adults read to them. The beginning stages of early literacy come from infants hearing the rhythms of language in a safe and comforting environment. As a result of being read to, babies learn how books are held and which side of the book is the beginning and where the reading starts on each page.
I hope that each of you with small children can find the time to read to them. They are certain to enjoy it and I am sure that you will enjoy it, too. Please note that there will be no school for students on Friday, February 29, 2008. Faculty members have professional development training that day.
