Will Reading to Liam Make Him a Genius?
April 21, 2009 at 10:20 am 2 comments
I have the books that I would like to read to Liam already planned out. I’ll most likely start with The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkein and then I’ll move onto the Harry Potter series. From there I might hit up the Lord of the Rings trilogy and then I might find something new and exciting that I didn’t read religiously when I was a teen. Perhaps some classic literature might do him some good. Why do I want to do this though? Does reading to a baby really make them smarter, or is this more for Mummy’s sake?
Perhaps reading to him from the start won’t make him smarter as such, but research has shown that the earlier babies are exposed to reading, the better they perform in school. Reading to baby also is a great way for family members to bond with bub. Well, awesome! That is more than enough reason for me to read my favourite books to an unresponsive blob! Not only will I be bonding with my little man, but he will be gaining some invaluable skills to help him when he’s older.
I have another, more pressing reason for wanting Liam to be comfortable and familiar with words at a young age though. His father has Dyslexia. My husband is one of the smartest people I know, but he was severely disadvantaged at school. While I know that Dyslexia is a learning disability that can happen to people of any intelligence level, I’m hoping that by surrounding Liam with words from the start it will help him work through the disability should he be unfortunate enough to inherit it from his father.
According to Wikipedia, there is no cure for Dyslexia, but that doesn’t mean that sufferers are destined to a life where reading and writing is an impossibility:
There is no cure for dyslexia, but dyslexic individuals can learn to read and write with appropriate education or treatment. There is wide research evidence indicating that specialized phonics instruction can help remediate the reading deficits. The fundamental aim is to make children aware of correspondences between graphemes and phonemes, and to relate these to reading and spelling. It has been found that training, that is also focused towards visual language and orthographic issues, yields longer-lasting gains than mere oral phonological training.
I’ll be honest, I have no freakin’ clue what half that quote means, but it does give me hope that regardless of the outcome, Liam won’t be disadvantaged when he’s old enough to attend school. I imagine that I’ll be spending a lot of time working with him to overcome obstacles that most kids don’t face and that both he and I may want to kill each other (If I fail at keeping it fun or he gets bored), but I really believe its worth it! It may not make him a genius, but it will give him a head start that may be more important than any of us realise.
Entry filed under: Modern Parenting. Tags: books, dyslexia, education, learning disability, phonics, reading, school, teaching.
1.
Troy Jennings | April 21, 2009 at 12:23 pm
The quote basically just means that with training, dyslexics function perfectly fine. All the big words are just fancy linguist terms for sounds.
From personal experience, not just reading to your child, but encouraging them to read helps out dramatically in schooling. My experience being when I was a child, learning to read at a very young age and that carried through to a much better ability to learn while at school. Early reading teaches children comprehension skills, which it’s never too early to teach.
2.
Hilery Williams | April 22, 2009 at 5:32 am
Reading to and with children is a fantastic way of showing how much you want to spend precious time with them, as well as teaching them the rhythms of speech and a rich vocabulary. Importantly, they learn too that they can experience powerful feelings through the lives of others – thus enabling them to learn how to handle strong emotions at one remove. Reading with young children creates real readers.
May I suggest you don’t start with The Hobbit, fun as it is. Small children need rhyme and repetition, and a touch of scariness.
Grapheme – phoneme correspondence merely means connecting sounds with letters. Orthographic means spelling rules. Before all that, children need to recognise and generate rhyme: if a child can do this by the time s/he is about 3 and a half s/he is likely to be at the least a reasonable reader, given good teaching and positive educational experiences.
If s/he finds this impossible, despite good vocabulary and input, then there is likely to be a dyslexic difficulty – especially with a family history such as your son’s.