Literacy

Our ten-month-old likes books.

He smiles at many of the pictures as we’re reading, reviews a book by looking through it again once I’ve read it, and points at things that catch his interest. He is developing his page-turning skills, though sometimes he’s a bit over-eager with this task. He already shows a preference for certain books, and he sometimes “reads” on his own.

It’s fun to pass along this love of reading, and it’s more my responsibility that I may have realized. Today I came across a summary of some research out of Harvard that found the following four factors encourage childhood reading:

• a home literacy environment (lots of print material, positive attitudes toward reading, etc.)
• mother’s educational expectations of the child
• mother’s own education
• parent-child interaction

Would that every child had the proper balance of these four elements to give them a solid educational foundation.