What Can Reading Do For Kids? Reading is fundamental. It’s an undeniable fact that having reading skills can help a child grow and be successful in school, work and life in general. It enhances and expands their vocabulary and helps them to be more active and imaginative.
To be able to read, it is all about what they can hear and understand and what is presented to them on a page. Even if your child doesn’t understand every word, they can distinguish a sound, word or phrase which they can try out and copy what they heard.
Studies even show that children who read for enjoyment increase their knowledge and a better understanding of the different variety of information. If a child reads well, it is mostly a determining factor that they are most likely to be successful in their life regardless of social or economic background. Here are some reasons what reading can do to children and why you should encourage them to do so.
Supported Cognitive Development
Reading can help children to improve and help along with the development of their cognitive capability. Cognitive development is the emergence of the ability to think and understand. This involves the construction of thought processes, remembering, problem-solving and decision- making. It is a technical term to define the ability of how a person perceives reality and exploring the world through information processing, intelligence, language development, and reasoning.
Essentially when a child reads, it provides them a vivid imagination and background knowledge on their world, which helps them make sense of what they see, hear and read. Introducing reading to a child’s life and the conversations afterward will help them make sense of their own identity especially at a very young age.
Improved Language Skills
Reading can help in language acquisition and literacy skills, even at a very young age. This is because there’s a part of the child’s brain working double-time that allows them to understand the meaning of a language and helps build key language, literacy, and social skills.
Furthermore, it gives the children the ability to learn the language of books, which differentiate from the language heard in daily life. Book languages are more descriptive and tend to be more on the grammatical aspect so kids can learn how to properly formulate sentences and be able to communicate properly.
Increased Concentration And Discipline
Children have a very short period, they tend to get bored easily and focus on other different things at the same time. Reading can help them establish a sense of concentration and self-discipline. Giving your child a story to focus on will help them big time in the aspect of developing a habit of concentration on any forms of media presented to them.
Along with reading comprehension comes with a sense of stronger determination, longer attention span and better memory retention, these are important when your child enters academics.
Prepare For Academic Success
The more words in a child’s language world, the more words they will be able to learn. This can be helpful when a child enters school. They will be able to communicate properly with their peers and teachers and will be able to excel in any subjects.
Reading can help them achieve phonemic awareness, which is the ability to be able to hear, identify and play with individual sounds in spoken words. While children can accomplish these skills when they enter school, it’s not a bad habit to have a bit of a jumpstart.
Improved Imagination And Creativity
Young kids have the capacity of bigger imaginations and dreams. Reading can help them explore more of those and expands it further to go through places, times and events beyond their own experiences. This activity will help them open doors to every world available there.
With reading, they can develop a picture, an imagination where they will be the ones who create a visual narrative, what’s happening in every chapter and they can connect with the characters as well. They can link to these characters and relate to them.
Diversify Their Knowledge
Books are everywhere and they come in different shapes and sizes. They are diverse and can provide different topics and knowledge that a child needs to survive in life. Learning to read at a very young age gives them a wide range of information for them to learn.
There are lots of informative books on topics as different animals, places or any living and nonliving things. Some books help children to develop life skills such as sharing, being kind and diversity.
Special Bond With Your Child
Reading with your children creates a never-ending bond like no other. It builds a strong relationship and you can positively influence their development. This kind of bond and trust cannot be overstated.
This is a form of a parent-child relationship, nurturing relationship between caregivers and children that will help them to set a positive life course. When you read aloud with your kids, it opens up a shared activity and gives you and your children something to talk about, this will lead to children developing a sense of reading and writing skills, even his communication skills will also be tackled.
Cultivate A Lifelong Love Of Reading
Reading is lifelong learning, and if you can instill a love of reading at an early stage in the life of a child, do it. You will be surprised that they will develop a commitment to reading. Children who enjoy and treasure books will likely to read on their own and continue to do so for the rest of their lives.
Conclusion
When it comes to reading, the benefits range far beyond and limitless. It develops a close bond with them and this kind of activity helps children to build understanding and develop a skill that is essential for their growth as they carry it with them throughout their life.
At its core, literature is one of the best ways to help children understand something without necessarily having to experience it themselves. Reading can help your child to be exposed to all types of subjects and concepts, building the children’s understanding of humanity and the world around them.