Do you read to your kids? Part 2

There are so many things that I, as a teacher, wish that people accepted regarding education. The list is, actually, endless: it lowers prejudice, it improves healthcare, it gains you respect, it makes your world safer, it makes you self reliant, it improves your confidence, it brings equality, it brings you money, it helps with economic growth,  it turns your dreams into reality… (I could go on, but I think I have made my point). I have never heard someone say “I wish I wasn’t so damn well-educated!”

Now that we have accepted the above fact, that education is good for us, how do we go about getting one? Or more importantly, how do we make sure that our children get one?

Do you read to your kids?

I guess this should come as no surprise- that the more you read the bigger your vocabulary will be. Research has been done into the way that vocabulary improves with different levels of reading, and while the results aren’t groundbreaking, it’s very interesting to see that an enthusiastic reader will build up a much bigger vocabulary in quite a short amount of time.

The online testing site, Test Your Vocabulary  has done a lot of research into how our vocabulary levels build and change throughout our lives, and the results are very clear- reading is important!

At around age 4, when children are only first starting to read, their average vocabulary levels are roughly equivalent in accordance with reading habits- as one would expect. This comes in at around 6,000 words. That to me is already an amazing number- they really are sponges! Then, it’s between the crucial ages of 4–15 where reading makes all the difference in the rate at which children increase their vocabulary. We can calculate the differences, although these should be taken as “ballpark approximations” at most, given the noisiness (that there are random fluctuations) of the data:

Reading habits	Vocabulary growth per day, ages 4–15
Reads “lots”	+4.1 words/day
Reads “somewhat”	+2.6 words/day
Reads “not much”	+1.4 words/day

First words

Every child is individual. Of that we are sure. But according to Clark (First Language Acquisition, 2003), there are certain things that most children learn at the same time as their peers- despite language and cultural differences.

Words are one of these things- studies have shown that many of us learn the same words at approximately the same time. Here we see the point at which 50% of children say a particular word:

Months       Words

12                 daddy, mommy

13                 bye

14                 dog, hi

15                 baby, ball, no,

16                 banana, eye, nose, bottle, juice, bird, duck, cookie, woof, moo, ouch,                        baabaaa, night night, book, balloon, boat

17                cracker, apple, cheese, ear, keys, bath, peekaboo, vroom, up, down

18                 grandma, grandpa, sock, hat, truck, boat, thank you, cat