Read Any Good Books Lately?
Today I’d like to talk about the absolutely easiest way to help your child be more successful in every class she takes in school. It will even help her do well on the SAT test. I know, that’s way down the road, but later in this post I’ll explain why it’s important now.
Reading. There, that’s it. Oh, maybe I need to say more about it? Okay. Reading increases vocabulary (without having to study vocabulary words). Reading teaches us about people, places, ideas, problem solving, sequencing, events, cause and effect. It’s hands-down the best way to time travel, fight bad guys, try on new personas, learn about ourselves, and, lest we forget to mention, become better writers.
And get this. Studies reported in the Science section of The Independent show that reading a novel “causes biological changes in the brain which last for days.” The research was conducted at Emory University and showed that the heightened brain activity that occurred when reading a good book lasted for five days. Imagine what would happen if we read a little every day!
Now let’s get back to those SAT scores and writing. There are all kinds of studies that show a direct correlation between reading and growing our vocabularies – and a strong and large vocabulary is one of the best indicators of a good SAT score. More importantly, in all my experience as a teacher, the students who enjoy reading are always the best writers in the class. It almost seems that all that reading helps students learn the mechanics of writing by osmosis. Pretty cool, huh?
So, now that we’ve talked about how important reading is, let’s talk about how to get our kids to read. The first way is pretty obvious. We start when they’re babies with cloth books. We cuddle with our kids and read the books out loud to them and point to pictures and talk with them about what’s on the page. And we continue that way until they start to read books themselves. That’s when things start to get dicey. We’re busy, they’re proud they can read, and it becomes a little too easy to let them “do it by themselves.” However, if that’s what’s going on, we need to make a few adjustments.
When’s the last time your child saw you sit quietly with a book. When’s the last time you talked with your family about the book you’re reading? When’s the last time you read the same books your child is reading? And then talked with her about it? All these activities send the quiet message that books and reading are important and the whole family believes that and lives it.
Then there’s the public library. A library is like a museum of ideas, so what can we do to get our kids to see that? Maybe we need to make frequent visits. Check out more than the kids’ section or the young adult section. Look at an art book, or a book about music or architecture. Try them all. Every book counts.
Now for the deep weeds part. I’m just going to say this. I don’t like to see kids reading on a portable device. All books are not created equal – some are bigger than others, some have hundreds and thousands more words than others, and some deserve our attention because of the profound effort exhibited by the author. We need to help our kids become discriminating readers and if they grow up thinking all books are the same (on a portable device they only see one page at a time) then they will have a difficult time comparing one book to another. Don’t take my word for all this. Manoush Zomorodi, writer, podcaster, and journalist, researching digital vs. hard copy books has offered the following:
Digital technology has produced an ongoing fight within our brains. The more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having our eyes dart around a web page.
Linear reading, which is something we humans have developed over years and years, is what we need to do when want to do deep reading—like immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document. Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet, we don’t do that.
Recent research also shows us that reading an actual book requires the use of more than just looking. When we touch a book, when we hold it and become aware of its heft, when we run our fingers across the pictures, or when our tears from the sad parts blot the page, we are “all in.” It means we are using more of ourselves, thereby giving us back a more meaningful experience. Isn’t that what we want for our children – more meaning in their experiences?
What do you think?
