Monfredo: Have You Read to Your Child Today? - It’s Important!

Sunday, September 13, 2015

As a principal for twenty years and now as a school committee member I have to advocate to the community the importance of reading aloud to our children. Many think everyone does it but it’s not happening and children are losing out.

At a yard sale at my house a mother was carrying her baby girl and I quietly asked her if she reads to her baby and her response was no for she’s only 15 months old. Little did this young mother know that reading aloud is widely recognized as the single most important activity leading to language development. My answer to this mother was that reading aloud builds sound awareness in children and leads to reading success. I could have gone on about how reading aloud to young children is not only one of the best activities to stimulate language but it also builds motivation, curiosity and memory. In addition, it exposes children to story and print knowledge as well as introduces rare words and ideas not often found in day to day conversations. Needless to say I gave her five books to bring home to read to her child!

As an educator I can tell you that reading problems are difficult to fix but very easy to prevent. Prevention happens in the early years. Research on the brain shows that the early years of life are most vital to a child’s development for a child’s brain is only 25 percent developed at birth. The other 75 per cent begins to develop shortly after. The more stimulation the baby has through its senses the more rapidly that brain development occur. Thus, the foundation of learning to read begins the moment a child first hears the sounds of people talking, the music in the room, and the rhythms and repetitions of rhymes and stories.

Another reason to read to our children is that it teaches them to listen and good listeners are going to be good readers as they enter school. The bottom line is that the more we talk to our children, the brighter they’ll be. Again, researchers found that low income parents spoke about 620 words to their children in an average hour compared with 2,150 words an hour spoken by parents with professional jobs. By age 3, the children with professional parents had heard 30 million more words than the children whose parents were low income. Thus, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies grew and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores were at age 3 and later.

When should a parent start reading aloud to their baby? The best time is the day that the child is born! Believe or not, babies love books for they respond to the bright pictures, the rhythm of the words and the presence of a loving adult.

As an elementary principal I would ask my parents each day that they came into the building whether they read to their child the night before. I even brought the author of the best seller “Read aloud handbook” Jim Trelease to talk to my parents and staff.

Jim spoke about developing a passion for reading and how crucial it was to read. He stated that every time we read to a child we’re sending a pleasure message to the child’s brain. “ You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.”

In his handbook Mr. Trelease states, “ Students who read the most, read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who don’t read much, cannot get better at it.” Backing up that statement is the 1985 report “Becoming a Nation of Readers” which states that reading aloud is the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.”

Another factor that we need to grapple with is that many homes still have no books in them. Without books where will our children see the print they need to see? Books and stories have to be in the home… that is a must. That is also what led my wife and I ten years ago to organize for the past ten years “Worcester: the City that Reads.” Each year we have a book drive and those books are given to the schools and to social agencies for children to bring home and keep in their homes. In ten years we have collected over 300,000 books and distributed them to the children in Worcester. Owning good books means children can read them over and over again, thereby gaining all the benefits of the repetition of the stories.

In addition, Worcester now has an organization bringing all reading advocates together called Worcester: Reads. The group is passionate about promoting reading and has as its slogan …

The more I read

The More I’ll know

20 minutes a day

Will help me grow”

We all know that reading serves as the major foundational skill for all school based learning. As a former principal I strongly recommend the emphasis be placed on early childhood literacy from birth to age eight. These are critical years for literacy development in linking a child’s success in learning to read. Children’s author Emilie Buchward said it best, “Parents play a vital role in this undertaking for children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” As a community let’s all do what we can to make reading a top priority.