Did You Know? Facts about Reading.

A single moment of understanding can flood a whole life with meaning. (Anon)

Did you know, that across the world, children who read the most read the best regardless of social levels, income levels or where they live?

Did you know that reading is one of the most important skills a child can learn because it will be difficult for a child to master any subject without knowing how to read?

Did you know that fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores (in PISA 2009) than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.

Did you know that listening comprehension comes before reading comprehension and that you must hear a word before you can say it or read and write it? According to Jim Trelease, author of New York Times bestseller, “The Read Aloud Handbook”, (from which many of the facts in this article come), there’s a “word reservoir” in a child’s brain and one thing that parents can do, is to pour as many words into that brain so that it overflows into speech, then reading and writing.

Did you know that by age four, high-income children have heard 45 million words from their families and low-income children have heard just 13 million? That’s a 32 million word difference according to Hart and Risley’s “Meaningful Differences”.

Did you know that children learn an average of 4,000 to 12,000 new words each year as a result of book reading?

Did you know that children read on one level and listen on a higher level and it’s not until Year 8 that the reading level catches up to the listening level?

Did you know that children who grow up in homes where books are plentiful go further in school than those who don't and have the highest reading scores? Children with low-education families can do as well as children with high-education families if they have access to books at home.

Did you know that research shows that those children who watch the most television, know the least. The average child spends 1460 hours a year watching television, DVDs and playing computer games, equal to watching “Gone With the Wind” 392 times a year.

Did you know that students who read widely and frequently are higher achievers than students who read rarely and narrowly?

Did you know that studies have proven that increased family engagement in educational programs is linked with increases in child reading achievement and other academic successes?

Did you know that parents are the key reading role models? High frequency reading parents are six times more likely to have high frequency reading children.

In the National Year of Reading, 2012, it’s rather appropriate that we focus on the benefits of reading. There are so many distractions that take our children away from reading books and magazines these days. Television, computer games, movies and a raft of outdoor activities results in many children spending less time reading books or magazines, for pleasure.

There are books which can change our perspective on life, open our eyes to new experiences and emotions, bring comfort when we are sad, bring hope when we are down, bring joy and excitement at new possibilities and allow us to escape to another world or country without even leaving home. As Edward P Morgan wrote:

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's [or woman’s] mind can get both provocation and privacy.

Reading books to our children, even more importantly, allows us to bond with our children and share experiences because of the opportunity to relate the story to our own life and day to day events, which in other circumstances, may never have been discussed with our child.

The process of reading and the joy of reading are inextricably interwoven. By developing a love of reading in young children we are allowing them to experience more of life than what otherwise may be possible. Understanding and empathising with the emotions and thinking of characters or real life people in books we read is but one way of developing a greater depth of understanding of oneself. As the wise Chang Ch’ao wrote:

Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice;
reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard;
and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.
This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the
depth of one's own experience.

Over time, with greater experience, our understanding deepens and in the end, we become a better person and a wiser person for understanding the perspectives of others – lessons learned personally or vicariously through the books we read. Celebrate reading by reading in this, the Year of Reading.

Karon Graham