Benefits for Reading
Starting from infancy, children appreciate reading. Reading stimulates senses and strengthens maternal and paternal bonds. Language and communication skills are developed as a result of reading. Reading exposes you to cultures, lifestyles, and worlds beyond your own environment.
Tips
- Let Children read comic strips, cereal boxes and magazines
- Gradually move children from their grade level reading at an appropriate pace (don't rush them)
- Share familiar books over and over
- Read to your children or have them read to you every night
- Set aside a regular time to read to your children every day
- Surround your children with reading material
- Have a family reading time
- Encourage a wide variety of reading activities
- Develop the library habit
- Be knowledgeable about your children's progress
- Show enthusiasm for your children's reading
- Be sure to give them genuine praise for their efforts
Summer Reading
Giving children books may be as effective as summer school. Reesearch shows a well-documented "summer slide" in academics that, by sixth grade, accounts for as much as 80% of the achievement gap. Researchers note that low-income students lose about three months of ground each summer to middle-class peers.You do that across nine or 10 summers, and the next thing you know, you've got almost three years' reading growth lost.
The study to be published later this year in Reading Psychology. Students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida were given 12 books each on the last day of school for three consecutive years. In all, 852 students received books each year, paid for mostly by federal Title I money. Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.
