My wife and I are strong believers in the benefits of reading to our son. It clearly helps with bonding and quality time, and his pediatrician, Dr. Matthew @ Summit Pediatrics in Reno, says it’s one of the most important things we can do for his brain development. This article on the NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories Podcast today says that it may not be enough.
It’s not that reading didn’t help a child to learn. It helped to build a child’s vocabulary, for example. But it didn’t necessarily improve a child’s ability to read, per se. [NPR]
What they did next was interesting. They used Eye Tracking on children to determine what they were looking at while being read to.
They found that when you simply read a book to kids, they tend to ignore the print on the page. More than 90 percent of the time the children are focusing on the pictures, or they are looking up at the parent, she says. [NPR]
Makes sense, learning to read is about connecting visual symbols with sounds. While my son can recite lines from a lot of his books from memory whether he’s looking at them or not, he doesn’t know the words, just the story.
Learning to read is an incremental process; you become familiar with letters, then words; the practice of reading from left to right; and eventually you put all that together and begin to read. But if a child’s attention isn’t drawn to the printed word, then reading to a child won’t necessarily make them more familiar with what it means to read. [NPR]
To make reading more helpful with learning, researchers had certain pre-school teachers add in some questions and prompts that got children to look at letters and words. I have always prompted my son to point out and/or identify images on the page. Like, where’s the lion. Or, what’s this (points to cow).
The teachers were told to read their books four times a week, and to point out the print in this way between four and eight times, so that together the small phrases hardly added extra time to their reading sessions — maybe 90 seconds per book. [NPR]
For instance, adults can ask children questions and comments about print, such as “Where should I read on this page?”“Do you know this letter?” and “This word is “danger.” They can also track words in text and point to print embedded within illustrations. In high-quality reading sessions, such print referencing is additive. In other words, print referencing occurs in addition to other facilitative practices to encourage children’s learning, language, and engagement during shared reading. [Child Development]
“Children who focused their attention on print … had better literacy outcomes than those who did not,” says Piasta. “It was very clear.”[NPR]
I’m going to start using some of these techniques when reading to my son from now on. Also, I wonder if some of the iOS apps that read stories while the text appears have any benefits? Some of the Dr. Seuss book apps from Oceanhouse Media like Dr. Seuss’s ABC have a fair amount visual text interactivity including the ability to touch the text to hear the word accompanied by reinforcing visual bumps and cues.
What do you think? What do you do in addition to just reading to get your kid more engaged?
-Mike
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