read to your kids...early

Maybe this will be a short blog for once…let me set the scene. I’m sitting on the speckled, red berber carpeting at the foot of my bed. My boys are crashed out and so are my parents. My wife is keeping me company, staying up much later than either of us planned. We’re all in a hotel together, recovering from our long but fun day of enjoying summer break.

Earlier I was reflecting about how lucky our boys are because my wife is a bookworm. I don’t know how many of you all read my introduction but she is a lover of literature and one of her many book related passions is children’s stories. I think she was amassing her collection all those fifteen years ago before we even met. The horde has grown over time as she’s scoured book stands at the flea market and eagerly attended library sales (I’ve never met someone get so excited over a dusty $0.50 set of cardboard pieces surrounding crunchy pages). I like the pictures, she loves the stories…it is starting to wear off on me, but it’s really impacting the boys.

Our oldest started his affair early. I think his one of his favorite stories at the beginning was good night gorilla. It is a story about a sleepy zookeeper and a precocious gorilla who releases each and every successive animal from their enclosure that the zookeeper says “good night” to. It is a sweet story and perfect for bedtime because not more than once, do the characters in the story go to sleep.

The text in the story was simple; “Good night gorilla” “Good night giraffe” “Good night lion” (I think that is the actual order in which the animals are put to bed; I’ve read that story too many times). Our son would love to say the animal’s names at each successive page; he loved to make the “boop, boop, boop…” sound effects as all the animals marched behind the zookeeper to go to sleep at his house. Then he would crack up when the wife’s eyes sprang open after all the animals said good night and she had to walk them back to their cages. That was his favorite for a very long time; our younger son likes it too, but it is funny that he responds to different parts in a completely different way.

According to Ms. Wolf our son was preparing to read every single time we opened that book together. In fact he has been preparing to read from the very moment he opened his first book as a baby. Chapter six of Proust and the Giant Squid by Maryanne Wolf is all about the young reader’s brain and the biological components that prepare a child to learn to read. Apparently the very act of sitting in the lap of a loved one and listening to a beloved story being read sets the scene for children to become successful readers themselves; the simple act of sitting in someone’s lap creates a love memory that endures in the subconscious that we all respond to when we curl up with a good book.

In chapter six, Ms. Wolf seems to list countless positives for a child to be exposed to reading at a very early age. In an effort to be concise, I will list some of them here. As I type these points, please keep in mind that when I say a child is reading, it most always means “when the child is listening to an adult read to them”. Thanks for that little side note.
-Kids learn to experience and practice different emotions by reading and empathizing with the characters they read about.
-Kids learn different kinds of language skill types, like “for no light ever touched his skin”…no one really talks that way…that is her point; even though no one actually does talk that way, kids still learn to not only understand it, but associate it with the magic of the imaginary world.
-There are some others, but mainly, it seems like common sense…reading at an early age is good…

But reading at too early of an age is bad. Have you seen those commercials on kids cartoon stations? They say that you too can teach your baby to read!!! Well, I know I’ve been tempted by them. Though I tend to be skeptical of tv commercials in general, it is real tempting, I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids to learn to read early right? Well, apparently most everyone should NOT want their baby to read early. Apparently it may actually compromise future comprehension. So unless a child shows that she or he WANTS to learn early, it is a bad idea to push them to do so…

So, I’m getting pretty tired. I need to post this blog.

I will leave with two thoughts:

1. It takes children roughly 2,000 days to learn to read, whereas it took human culture roughly 2,000 YEARS to develop reading as we know it.

2. Rhyming helps kids to learn to read more efficiently. It has something to do with identify like sounds and thereby identify the components of words and thereby recognize that components of sounds link to make individual words…

Good night everyone.


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