A recent media report indicated that school teachers find that an increasing number of 5-year olds are unable to talk coherently and they blame Covid-19 and excessive screen time.
Teachers said that some children could not make sentences of more than four or five words, and showed a lack of positional language, pronouns and grammar tenses. For example, a 6-year old might say, "Me go outside," instead of "I am going outside."
The media article was all about how early preschool education should address this problem.
Thankfully, there is a very simple solution and for home educators and it is SO EASY!
Research suggests that there is a really effective antidote - one that any literate parent, rich or poor, can implement to give children of any age a huge linguistic advantage and, by implication a huge academic advantage too, over their screen-addicted, neglected peers.
What is the silver bullet for language excellence?
If you know us well, you've probably already guessed the solution.
It's reading aloud to children.
Jessica Logan, assistant professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University, calls the difference between children who are read to and those who aren’t “the million word gap”. Cumulatively, over the five years before preschool entry, researchers estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to. This impacts their language abilities and other academic skills.
Researchers have discovered that the brains of children who are read to are more agile and receptive to narrative, suggesting that they have a greater capacity to process what they hear and at faster speeds than their non-read-to peers. In other words, reading aloud boosts brain function and academic performance.
Reading to preschoolers has been found to dramatically accelerate language acquisition, increase concentration skills, emotional resilience and self-mastery. This catapults children ahead of their peers academically. The evidence has become so overwhelming that social scientists now consider reading aloud as one of the most important indicators of a child’s prospects in life!
We don't have data about how reading aloud impacts older children, but we can extrapolate that the advantage will continue to accumulate. In our own families, after years of being read to, we observe that our children enjoy all of the benefits reported above. They have all achieved far above average in their school-exit exams and post-homeschool studies and pursuits (so far!)
You don't have to add reading aloud to your already busy homeschool day. You should simplify your life to make space for it - drop the online lessons, the textbooks and workbooks for each subject (except maths) and make reading aloud the vehicle for education.
All of our Footprints programmes in both English and Afrikaans are designed to make reading aloud and rich learning a seamless process - we've sifted through hundreds of books, to give you the most engaging and delightful, as well as educationally-loaded stories we can find. Everything you need is at your fingertips, when you need it. You just open the books and read and in so doing, you boost your children's language and other abilities to (probably) among the best in the world!
