Why it is so important to read to children and make sure children are reading

Reading is important to help our children learn and develop. Reading helps children build their vocabulary. Reading improves children's spelling and grammar... and so on and so forth.

These are message I hear regularly as I move through my days at Teacher College and at the bookshop. They are messages I completely and whole heartedly agree with, and the evidence is clear when you're in a classroom as well. The children who read vigorously are achieving higher across the academic subjects than those who don't.

So academic achievement, cognitive development and literacy are all extremely important reasons to encourage children to read. However, I believe that there is another extremely important reason why we should read to our children, which is often overlooked.

A few weeks ago, in our 'teaching and learning' lecture, we were discussing Jean Piaget's cognitive theory, specifically his ideas around schemas. Schemas are like a the tools we use to make sense of the world around us, we see the world through our schemas, our understanding, and depending on experience we will either make sense of what we see or not understand it. We build schemas for everything, for what a dog is, what a cat is, what a beach is. If you want a great website to give a more detailed, but still simple, overview this is a great one.

Recently I got into a big fight with a friend. I didn't understand what he was feeling or how he was acting because it wasn't something I have ever successfully build a schema for. It caused us both a lot of hurt until I was able to see that just because I didn't understand, that didn't make it wrong. 

Now I know what you're probably thinking, 'Taylor, you told us this was going to be a blog about reading, what does Piaget have to do with that?', well I'm glad you asked!

I believe that the most important reason that we need to be reading to our children is because it helps them build schemas for things they would not otherwise experience. Reading can not only help our children to become literate, but also to become culturally and socially literate as well. But this means that we need to not only be reading 'normal' books to our children, but also books about different places, different cultures, different anything! Our life experiences are never going to be the same as someone else's, like my experience with my friend showed me, this can sometimes cause problems when we don't have a means to understand where the other person is coming from. Especially in the modern world we live in, the culture we belong to is not going to be the only culture we are exposed to or experience. The world is becoming a lot smaller thanks to technological development. This means that our ability to understand and successfully interact with all corners of the world needs to get bigger and better, I believe that reading is a fantastic starting point.

Lets help our kids build those schemas through words and pictures, so when they experience things in the real world they have a better chance at understanding and succeeding!