Proust and the Squid, Posting #5

So my post today is going to be sort of a scientific approach to reading. What I am going to talk about is how exposing children to reading early can help with their literacy later in life, when they develop the ability to read write and talk. When most people, that do not know much about education, hear about early exposing kids to reading early, they think this means that they should try to teach their baby or toddler to read. Now I know this sounds kind of cool to have you baby or toddler reading months before other kids pick up a book, but what most parents who do this do not know, is that this can have a developmental affect on their child. What happens when a child learns to read at a very young age is very complicated in a way. So here is the watered down version, at least from what understood from the book. When a child learns to read too early in their development, it effects the development of their neurotransmitters in their brain. This can then cause the neurotransmitters to develop slower and cause problems later in development.

             What I am talking about is very different from teaching your child how to read at a young age. When I say this I mean reading to your children. We all might have childhood memories with our parents reading to us while we are curled up in our arms. This was something that helped us feel positive about reading. “ The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientists or educational researcher could have designed a better one” (Wolf, 83). When a child is read to they begin to associate words with pictures and visual images become more familiar to them. As Wolf states in her book, a child can begin to do this around eighteen months, and this is when “ the brain gets the ability to connect two or more systems to make something new” (Wolf, 84).  Children that are read to more often during childhood understand all of the language around them better than a child who was not read to in their childhood. The best way to read to your child, as stated in the book Proust and the Squid by Wolf, is to use visual images while reading. So the best way is to read picture books. This way the child begins to see that a picture of a dog is associate with the word dog. This is the key to language and literacy development later in life.  This is because they are learning the sounds of the words and seeing the words and also seeing those two combinations associated with a picture. When children are learning to read on their own, they will see the word dog and recall the sounds and also be able to visualize the picture of the dog. Now this may not be for every child, but after reading this chapter I do believe that reading to your child early is key to developing their literacy skills later in their life.