Reading & The Word Gap
Snuggled up with my son for some holiday reading!
Reading is a tool that can help boost vocabulary considerably before a child ever enters a formal public education classroom. Having a strong foundation for vocabulary prior to entering school can help young people start and stay on track once formal education begins. Think of it this way, when building a house, one must start by pouring the concrete foundation before the framework. Similarly, kids need a firm foundation of vocabulary before starting on the framework of the kindergarten state standards. Kids who don’t have a strong vocabulary prior to kindergarten are already in need of remediation before the first day of school even starts; like a house with the framing placed directly on top of loose dirt. Talking to kids throughout the day is wonderful, but studies show that, “Vocabulary exposure through children’s book reading sessions is more lexically diverse than standard caregiver-child conversations” (Logan, et al. 2019).
As a mom, I always want to be sure my son has the resources he needs to find his way in life later on. I want him to be firm in his faith, kind, well rounded, educated, find joy in what he does, and my fingers are crossed in hopes he will become an independent reader one day. Like all children, my son took his time developing fine motor skills and speaking skills at his own pace. Waiting for him to begin forming words of his own felt agonizingly slow at times, and occasionally had my husband and me worried. However, after reading about language development in children and consulting my numerous speech therapist friends (thank y’all!), I was reassured that the best thing to continue promoting his speech and language development included narrating everything we did and spending at least 20 minutes a day reading.
I recalled the idea of reading 20 minutes a day being expressed in one of the professional development books I read in preparation of teaching dyslexic students, Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz. One figure in the book stuck with me throughout my teaching career into motherhood, which reflects the massive difference in language exposure for children who read under five minutes a day (8,000 words) versus 20 minutes or more a day (1.8 million words) over the course of a year (Shaywitz 2003). As a high school English teacher, I took this statistic to heart and made it a priority to provide students with free reading time during class. This was easy enough, as the students were doing the legwork of reading. However, as a mom, while my goal is always to read to my son at least 20 minutes a day, there are days where I feel completely drained and unable to muster more than a few minutes of reading aloud. My son is two, so to access language in books he needs someone literate to read to him. Thankfully, our local libraries and Barnes and Noble offer story times that cover multiple days a week (library story times: Monday - Thursday 9:30am or 10:30am, Barnes & Noble: Fridays at 10:30am). These events are weekly and offer a great way for my son to listen to books and socialize while I relax and drink my coffee hot. Our library also has a robust online catalogue of books, including audiobooks, for me to check out on my phone and play in the car, or while we are having down time at home. For physical books, we love checking out new books from our local library, visiting Little Free Libraries in our area, finding new books at local thrift stores for less than $1, and being members of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
The takeaway? Grab a book, no matter how long or short, and read to the little people in your life today! You know you’re setting them up for success later on, while they think they’re just having fun letting their imagination run wild through reading.
Links for further reading: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30908424/
