Why Children Should Read More During School Breaks
A good book can help you escape the stress and chaos of daily life. This makes reading all the more essential during a pandemic when you’re locked at home with your kids.
At Mrs. Myers' Reading Room, we realize how beneficial reading is for all age groups, especially children. Building strong reading skills in childhood helps children excel at school.
Click here to learn how we can help your child become a better reader.
And today, we will talk about why children should be reading as Southeast Wisconsin public schools stay closed indefinitely.
How Reading Helps Children
Reading offers several benefits. It builds your vocabulary, emotional intelligence, curiosity, memory, and concentration. Kids who make reading a habit not only possess strong syntactic and grammatical skills, but they are able to apply them fluently to their own experiences.
Ideally, reading should begin a long time before children enter formal schooling. Parents who read to their children stimulate their literacy experience early on. This gives them an edge in developing their vocabulary and print and literacy concepts.
That’s why children who are not exposed to reading in their pre-school years struggle in kindergarten and elementary grades. They find it hard to develop an awareness of language patterns and sound structures.
Children at risk of reading failure include those who come from poor households or from families who don’t speak English as a first language. Apart from these factors, children can also struggle with reading if they are not exposed to bedtime or lap-time reading. Moreover, children with speech or hearing disabilities struggle even more.
Coming back to the benefits of reading, children acquainted with books also become better communicators. They understand the nuances of language and can express themselves with clarity in both speech and writing. This is essential for success at school as well as in their future careers.
Even from a non-academic perspective, reading to your children or reading with them offers a great bonding activity.
What Happens During A School Break
It is widely established now that students experience learning losses over the summer and winter breaks. We have a hundred year’s research that tells us that students lose 2.5 months of their previous education before starting a new school year.
The latest findings suggest that students can forget about 40% of what they learned during the previous year as they go back to school after a break. So imagine what six months of lockdown can do to their reading skills.
That’s why you have to help your child catch up with their reading before schools reopen in Southeast Wisconsin. Luckily, there is a wealth of material online that can help children boost their reading skills.
At Mrs. Myers' Reading Room, we offer various programs and activities to help kids aged 5 to 12 with reading and math. We also offer tutoring and online classes. All our students have consistently shown growth as compared to their peers not enrolled. Click here to sign up for our reading programs.
