Bedtime stories for young brains
By Perri Klass, New York Times
A little more than a year ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement saying that all pediatric primary care should include literacy promotion, starting at birth.
That means pediatricians taking care of infants and toddlers should routinely be advising parents about how important it is to read to even very young children. The policy statement, which I wrote with physician Pamela C. High, included a review of the extensive research on the links between growing up with books and reading aloud, and later language development and school success.
But while we know that reading to a young child is associated with good outcomes, there is only limited understanding of what the mechanism might be. Two new studies examine the unexpectedly complex interactions that happen when you put a small child on your lap and open a picture book.
This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home.
Thank you so much for sharing this link. As a retired elementary teacher and reading specialist, I have long been well aware of the powerful impact that reading to pre-school children has on the ease with which they learn to read. It was interesting to learn some of the “why” from this article.
Last thought. Another result of reading to children before they start school is the head start they get in “phonemic awareness,” which is the understanding that the funny looking marks on the page stand for sounds of the language they already know how to speaks. Learning to read is much easier when a person understands this — much less burden on the memory.