Imagination Library helps instill a love of reading in littlest learners
June 8, 2012 at 7:00 pm in West Central Tribune
WILLMAR Amid the research about early childhood learning, one of the figures that jumps out at Renee Nolting is this: By the time children from families with limited resources reach kindergarten age, they’ve heard 32 million fewer words than children from middle-class households.
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This really is a wonderful program. It puts books into households that can’t afford to buy them, because limited income is spent on bare essentials.
I am curious – how on earth can the number of words heard by “limited income” kids vs “middle class” kids be calculated? 32 million? How do they get that number? Do “limited income” parents have less to say??
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Breezy, I think they’re talking about limited vocabulary, but that number is still pretty strange. Are there even that many words in the English language? Seems to me there’s some kind of mistake in the story.
But they are right about a few other things. Kids who are read to do tend to read at an earlier age and more proficiently.
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I can vouch for that, personally – when I was little, my father read a book to me every night before bed. By the time I was 4, I was reading the comics in the paper to him… by the time I completed kindergarten I had read the full Winnie the Pooh series (the full length books used to come in a boxed set – anyone remember those?)… I read the Little House on the Prairie series in 1st grade.
Love of reading is something that carries on – I read to all my kids daily, and now I read to my little grand babies… hoping to continue the love of books – which isn’t easy in this electronic age.
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Many lower-income families have to spend a greater amount of time working to cover the essentials-food on the table, roof over their heads, electricity/water/sewer/garbage, etc. This leave less time to read to their kids-it leave less time to interact with their kids peirod. There is a terrific study at Jstart.org complete with references that explain these statistics. Included in the report is a (references cited) report of how a child growing up in a middle-class family has been exposed to between 1,000 and 1,700 hours of picture book reading, while a child from a low income family has been exposed to about 25 hours. You should read the report. It’s extremly informative, with many cited references from all over the educational spectrum.
I have taken part in the fundraisers Empower has put on since they began. It’s a terrific program that’s doing some wonderful things.
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Thanks for the direction to the study!
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Hi, Breezy – that’s a good question. The 32 million refers to the total number of words spoken. The estimate comes from a study that tracked the actual number of words spoken over the course of 3 years among 42 families from differing socioeconomic levels. You can read more about it here: it’s pretty interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/03/the-32-million-word-gap/36856/
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Hi Anne – thank you for the reference! Much appreciated!!
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From Anne’s link:
Nurturance and encouragement
Hart and Risley also found that, in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback; a working- class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements; a welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements.
That’s really troubling… and sad. And I’d be interested to know why that is.
As someone who was in a situation that made it necessary to utilize the welfare system for a time when my kids were small, my first gut reaction is to get defensive… but once I push past that, I find myself wanting to know WHY welfare homes are more prone to the negativity. And I want to know how to change that.
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For those who’d like to read the full paper by Hart and Risley, it’s here: http://1.usa.gov/MHJT3W
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