This blog post is the rough draft of my introduction for my research paper, exploring the connection between childhood reading and academic success. :)
Here’s the scene: I'm a ten-year old girl sitting in my Grandma Mellor's home in the small town of Globe, Arizona. I have my nose in a book, and she's chuckling as she moves to sit down on the couch beside me. "Did you know when I was a little girl I never stopped reading, either?" I put down the book for one moment and look at her, trying to imagine her without all the wrinkles and short gray hair. I can almost picture her skin smoothing out and her bright blue eyes remaining exactly the same. Slightly surprised I ask, "What did you read?" She tells me, "A bit of everything, but my favorite book was called Sarah, Plain and Tall. I was just like her! Plain, skinny, and tall. I loved that book."
Flash forward a couple years. My room is dark except for two little flashlight beams, one coming from my sister's bed and one from mine. The door suddenly slams open and we scream as our mom's silhouette appears at our bedroom doorway. "You two are still up reading?" She's incredulous, and it's late. "Did you even get your homework done?" We fumble excuses about how we just wanted to read one more chapter. "Well it's lights out and I'm going to have to take those until tomorrow." We reluctantly hand over our respective copies of Judy Moody and The Goose Girl. She seems like the bad guy in this situation, but we both knew that she would be upstairs reading her own novel. It's where we got the habit from.
Lastly, picture my four-year old sister. I am fourteen years older than her, and so bedtime story responsibility often fell to me. We're curled up in her big girl bed, a stack of picture books beside us. She giggles uncontrollably as I imitate what I imagine to be the stuffy British accents of "Frog" and "Toad," in Frog and Toad Are Friends. My fourteen-year old brother pokes his head into the room. He pretends to be uninterested, but I can see him smiling. Soon, all of my siblings are in Megan's room, each reading her a story before she goes to bed.
What is this phenomenon of family reading? It has brought us together and is one of the strongest bonds between the members of my family. It's not uncommon to find us all in one room, each wrapped up in another world. My parents read aloud to each one of us, starting as soon as we could look at pictures, and up until this day. My grandmother instilled a love of reading into my mother, and she instilled it into us. Curiously, all of my siblings have, to this point, excelled in school. My brother and sister are showing up my 3.9 GPA with perfect 4.0s, and our little preschooler knows the alphabet, can count to 100, and has a massive vocabulary, including “camouflage” and “pterodactyl.”
Experts tell us there is a strong correlation between childhood reading and academic success, but how true is this principle? Children’s television shows such as “Sesame Street,” “Super Why,” and others aired on PBS Kids and other stations definitely stress the importance of childhood literacy. In my experience of growing up in a bibliophile home, and watching four younger siblings grow up in that same environment, I would argue that we got good grades because we were read to in the home. With that in mind, other factors can potentially contribute to school performance, including how much and what type of television is consumed, whether or not family dinner is a regular occurrence, and whether or not the child has learning disorders such as autism or dyslexia. Reading aloud to young children ages one through ten fosters a love of reading, generates a feeling of safety in the home, and lays the foundation for academic success. Reading has positive effects on children, even if the other circumstances in the home are not ideal.
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