Reading to our kids from birth is incredibly important and thankfully, the importance of reading to children is not debatable. But with busy schedules, it is easy to let reading slip to the wayside, especially if our kids don’t have a natural love of books. I will be honest… there are some days that pass by and at bedtime I realize I have read very few books to Little Lion. But, I believe understanding the “why” is often good motivation to look for more ways to incorporate this habit into our day.

Reading to kids prepares them to be readers down the road. But there are a LOT of things in our lives that are important. What is it about reading that makes it important enough to take up a considerable chunk of our day? Isn’t teaching reading the responsibility of our children’s teachers? Surely, skipping our reading today isn’t that big a deal, right?

You may have heard of a phenomenon called the “word gap.” In case you haven’t, this summary from the Thirty Million Words Initiative website explains it up pretty well.

A world-famous study by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995) found that some children heard thirty million fewer words by their 4th birthdays than others. The children who heard more words were better prepared when they entered school. These same kids, when followed into third grade, had bigger vocabularies, were stronger readers, and got higher test scores. The bottom line: the kids who started out ahead, stayed ahead; the kids who started out behind, stayed behind. This disparity in learning is referred to as the achievement gap.

Thirty MILLION words. That is a LOT of words! And it makes a huge difference in the education and eventual success of an individual.

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So, let’s look at this from a learning perspective. Let’s keep things simple and assume that when students enter kindergarten they are all fluent in the language in which they are being taught (the fact that many children are not is a challenge for another discussion). Despite the fact that some have heard thirty million more words, they all have a working understanding of the language. They all can understand the teacher’s teaching. They all get appropriate education in sounding out letters, and then words, sentences, and so on. As children progress through kindergarten, first, and second grades, they gradually improve in their fluency (ability to say the words aloud at a reasonable pace) and comprehension (ability to understand the words and understand their meaning). As the text gets harder, students use the strategies they are using in school to sound out the new words. They use the context of the pictures to help figure out meaning. But for the students who have heard less words, this takes considerably more time. Slower reading means fewer words read. With a smaller vocabulary, students slowly fall farther behind their peers. This begins a cycle that is very difficult to reverse, and some studies show that children who are behind in reading in first grade are likely to remain behind.

Unfortunately, the struggles only get worse. In third grade the child encounters some pretty big challenges. First of all, third grade marks a shift in the education of the child. No longer are children learning to read. They begin reading to learn. This means that students must apply their understanding of the principles of reading learned and practiced through their early elementary years, and apply this with text about things that they may have very little previous experience.

In addition to this shift, something else happens in the reading life of a third grader. Most of the books lose an important piece which students (especially students with a limited vocabulary) have relied on for their entire reading career. The books no longer have pictures.

So imagine for a minute that you are a third grader, and you pick up a book. You come across the sentence that contains a word you don’t know. You sound out the word, and even though you aren’t completely sure what it means, your brain remembers (even if you don’t know it consciously) that when you were young, through conversation and lots of reading you have heard that word before. Even though it is a word that you have never READ before, it is a word that you have HEARD, which helps you use the context of the sentence to make meaning. The more broad your exposure to words as a young child, the more likely you will be able to make meaning from more complicated texts as you get older.

As an elementary school teacher, we gave students a daily homework assignment. It was the same every single day of the year. Read 20 minutes. Every single day. Often we got pushback from kids and parents. We have swim team! We have soccer! We just don’t have time! And I get that. Life can be crazy. But check out this chart… this is where it gets convincing for me too.

Imagine the compounded difference the charts would show if we started this 20 minute per day comparison from birth.

Most longer children’s books are written at a 3rd-4th (some even higher) reading level. That means that as your child gets older and you spend time reading to your child, you are exposing them to the very same vocabulary that they are going to encounter during those first tough years of reading to learn. And of course, this doesn’t just stop with reading. Conversation can have just as large an impact! I focus on reading mostly, because honestly a lot of these words I don’t USE in my every day conversation. Books give me an excuse to use words that I would never think to use on my own.

These are just some of the many reasons I want to read with my children. There are many more that have nothing to do with school performance! So, when I am tempted to skip the story at naptime, I try to think back to this data. We can’t be perfect, and of course there are days where we may just not have time. But it is absolutely amazing to me that such a small simple thing can make such an enormous difference in the future success of my little one, and knowing that I can make that difference definitely helps me put things into perspective.

How do you fit reading into your day?