Reading to your child

I found some notes that I have from a few years back.  Amazing how these statistics are still pertinent today!  I thought I would share them with you.  I hope you find this information as fascinating and eye-opening as I did:

Children need to be read to for at least 1000 hours before the age of 5 to be ready for kindergarten entry to put them on target in pre-reading and literacy skills.

Think about this – if a parent, daycare provider or preschool teacher reads one book a day from the child’s birth until 5 years of age, the child will only have had about 900 hours of being read to.  Hopefully, a child gets more than one book a day as he/she gets older.  But, how many newborns actually have at least a book a day read to them?  A teacher can make up the 100 hours in kindergarten.  The problem seems to be for those children who come from an environment where they are rarely read to.  If a child enters kindergarten with only 300 hours of reading time, for example, it is impossible for the teachers to ever make up the deficit.  Those children will be children at risk for literacy delays.  So, we as adults who care about children’s literacy skills must read stories, write the children’s stories as they dictate and read them books of all kinds.  Let’s do our best to help the next generation of learners be deficit free!

Pam Deutsch