Read to your child.

Yesterday I told a friend who teaches first grade that I had created this blog and could use her advice on what subject to cover.  Her immediate response was "Tell them to read to their child!  READ TO THAT CHILD!"  I agreed with her that this is crucial advice, but I didn't need to hear it from her.


I could read before I started first grade, and I attribute that to the fact that my parents read to me and encouraged me to learn as soon as I could.  My father had a book by Rudolph Flesch called Why Johnny Can't Read (and What You Can Do about It).  At a time when the "Dick, Jane, and Sally" method was popular in schools, Flesch vigorously advocated a return to phonics.  In the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I taught myself to read from the word lists at the back of his book.  Years later, I learned from my professional colleagues that Theodor Seuss Geisel used Flesch's book and the very same word lists in the back to compose his classic, The Cat in the Hat.  It turns out that Dr. Seuss and I were, literally, on the same page.


However, if you want your child to succeed in school, you can't wait until he's six years old to start reading instruction. Students whose parents rely on teachers to do all the work  will spend the rest of their education catching up with their classmates who had books in the house before starting school.  The advantage doesn't come from anybody's educational kit, and it costs nothing.  All you really need is a library card.  


Education experts agree that parents should sit down with their babies and read aloud to them every day. 


Even before a child is old enough to understand the meaning of the words, the experience of sitting on a parent's lap and listening to language will eventually help the child develop reading skills.  Perhaps more important, it will help develop a love for books and a motivation to learn more, because it helps children make a connection between learning and the love of the adults in their lives.  This is especially true if the adults reading to them are their fathers.  


Ideally, it's best to read a new story a day, although repetition is good.  Fortunately, most public libraries will allow parents to check out lots of books and keep them for over a week.  If you can take out ten books every week and keep the ones your child likes best for two or three weeks, perhaps reading two or three of them aloud every day, then your to your child will benefit tremendously.  


If you start early enough, it doesn't matter what the book is about.  Read them the telephone directory if you want to.  It doesn't even matter whether you can read the words on the page or not, although anyone who can read this can probably read a children's picture book.  Of course a child will probably catch on by the age of three or four, but if a parent can't read, having a newborn baby is a perfect opportunity to learn how.  Whether you believe in phonics or "whole language" instruction, just listening to the sound of the language, while seeing the written word, will help.  Someone (and I'm sorry I don't have a source for this) wrote that a child will learn to read after having heard a thousand stories, about one new book a day for three years.  That's a good goal.  


I decided long before I had my first child that I would read to her, starting on the day she was born.  I even chose the book years in advance, The Wind in the Willows.  I remember sitting up in my hospital bed holding her to my chest, and listening to the poetry of the language.  On finishing the book, I decided I didn't really like its message, but I like to think that she found comfort in the sound of the words in the voice that should have been familiar to her after nine months.  At about six months, she started grabbing at books and trying to put them in her mouth, so we had to rely on cloth, plastic, and cardboard books for a while.  I did supply her with alphabet blocks and a few other educational toys and games, but I got over the educational-toy-buying urge by the time her two younger sisters started school.  She read her first book at age 3 and read more as a child than I did, and her SAT reading score in high school was 800.  The other two are also excellent readers, and I'm going to stop boasting now.  I mention this not to argue that my children are better than anybody else's, but to argue that parents who read to their children from the beginning can give them advantages they won't have if nobody reads to them.