Latest / The Christy-Faith Show / Ep. 127 - Benefits of Reading Aloud to Kids - Even After They Can Read

Transcript

Ep. 127 - Benefits of Reading Aloud to Kids - Even After They Can Read · The Christy-Faith Show

• 0:00
  Christy-Faith: Should you be reading to your kids? It feels like a preference thing. Right? Like, maybe this is only a thing that certain types of homeschoolers do. I know it's really popular in the classical space to be doing read alouds.
• 0:12
  You may be surprised to learn that it's one of the most researched questions in education, and the answer's been sitting in a government report for forty years. Reading out loud to your kids is the single most important thing you'll do for your child as a reader. Chances are, if you're listening to this show today, you're already kinda the read aloud type of parent. You see the value. You love doing it.
• 0:37
  You're a homeschool family, and you love reading out loud to your kids. A lot of people do it right before bedtime, and it's a really great thing to be doing. Maybe some of you haven't really been doing it, and you're curious as to why it's such an important thing to be doing. So this show today is for the parent who's already reading out loud just to reinforce and remind you why you're doing it, and we're gonna go into some of the research and cognition of this important thing to be doing. And then for those of you who this concept is new or you haven't really been prioritizing it in your homeschools or your homes, if you're not a homeschooler, this is gonna be a show as well because we're gonna explore this idea of why we should be doing this.
• 1:15
  And what I'm super excited to share with you today is a surprise about the research in reading out loud to your kids, but I'm gonna hold it to keep it as a surprise. For the show today, I did a truckload of reading, so you don't have to. Yay. So pour something warm or cold. I have my fizzy drink right here.
• 1:34
  And let's talk about why that book on the couch might outrank half of what's on your lesson plan. Can't wait to get into it. Hello, and welcome to The Christy-Faith Show, the podcast for homeschool moms who take their craft seriously. On our show, we have conversations that sharpen how we think about education, motherhood, and the beautiful life that you're building. I'm so happy to have you here today.
• 2:10
  I am Christy-Faith, if you don't know me already, twenty plus years in education, author of homeschool rising, and homeschool mom of four kiddos. I got a high schooler all the way down to elementary, twins in between. I'm also the founder of Thrive Homeschool Community, my heart, my soul, my guts. It's what I wish I had all those years ago when I started homeschooling and I didn't see it, so I created it. Yay.
• 2:35
  It's not always open, but if you also are on this train of wanting to do this job really well, get on the wait list. We do open at really good times of the year, and I promise to treat my waitlisters like VIPs. I'm so thankful that you guys hold on for the months that you do. I gotta be vulnerable here for a minute because reading out loud has been a difficult journey for me. In the beginning, when I started reading out loud, my neck would feel sore.
• 3:02
  My throat was dry, and I just didn't feel like it was an easy thing to be incorporating into my homeschool. I did build those muscles. We started really enjoying it, but I want to just acknowledge right now if you're a mama who struggles with it or hasn't done it yet, it may be foreign to you or maybe you've tried it and didn't enjoy it. Hang on to this show because I think this is gonna be a worthy show for you to be listening to. There are some mamas who just love it and eat it up, and then there's some moms where it feels like chore, and both of those are okay.
• 3:36
  I just wanna lay that out there right now. Think about the last time reading with your kid felt like a chore. You know what I'm talking about? Somebody slumped against you doing the absolute minimum of listening. You're doing the voices on autopilot, and there's a little clipboard running in your head.
• 3:52
  Did that count? Was that the full twenty minutes? Do I log it somewhere? And I just wanna say right off the bat that that clipboard mentality of reading is the whole problem. Because somewhere back in time, who knows where, we let reading get renamed.
• 4:09
  It used to just be a story and now it's literacy. And though literacy is very important to me as is to you as well, it's not really a cozy word. It kinda has a scope and sequence. Literacy has benchmarks. Literacy is a thing your kid can fall behind in.
• 4:25
  When a British research team asked a big group of parents about reading to their children, only about four in ten reached for the words fun for me. Four in 10 parents enjoyed it. The other six are white knuckling story time, and it's a subject to just get through. Or they're doing it because they know it's something they're supposed to be doing. And honestly, can you blame them?
• 4:48
  We've been handed reading as homework with just better lighting. I can recall growing up in public school being assigned to remember these core books, and I remember just automatically thinking they weren't gonna be good books because they were required. And now when I look back at what was required as the core books in public school, they were pretty amazing books. But I discounted them from the get go because they were required by school. But as a society, we've kind of taken reading and made it a sit still, sound it out, listen, what's going on in the story, answer these questions at the end, prove to me you were paying attention.
• 5:25
  For crying out loud, when I taught seventh grade English and literature, I gave them pop quizzes on all of the chapters. I remember quizzing them on Huckleberry Finn. Oh, what a way to ruin a great book. Right? But you have to do it in schooling because otherwise, the kids won't read it.
• 5:39
  What we did as a society is we took the bedtime story, this sacred thing, and turned it into an oral exam in pajamas. The minute reading out loud to your kids turns into one more box to check on the school checklist or on the life checklist if you're not a homeschooler, what ends up happening? It then has to compete with everything else on that checklist. And sadly, it loses every time because it's hard for parents to do, generally speaking. I can speak personally that on days when everything completely fell apart, I often cut read aloud because I felt so behind.
• 6:15
  I had so much laundry to do, so much cooking to do, or whatever I was busy doing. I cut the thing that took my time. It's understandable. It's also easy to cut because it's hard to measure. It doesn't have a worksheet attached to it.
• 6:28
  It's not tangible. So it's easy to cut and your kids can still do those other things and you feel like you've had a good school day. So the one primary idea that I wanna explore today and I wanna make sure that we all kind of deem as important is this idea of reading is not a box to check, it's a place to go. Somebody talked us into making it a box to check, and we just need to climb right out of that. Now, if you're anything like me, there's a question humming under all of this, especially around this time of year.
• 7:01
  Am I doing enough as a homeschool mom? Isn't that always the question? Am I doing the right things? Am I messing my kids up? You look at the shelf, you look at the clock, You look at that mom online or that mom at co op, and you see what she is doing whose kids apparently read the Iliad for fun.
• 7:17
  And you start to worry, and you start to feel guilty. And the verdict is always the same. The verdict is always we're really hard on ourselves. We've heard it said a lot in the homeschool space that if you do nothing at all in your homeschool day, do a read aloud. And the data backs this up.
• 7:32
  So when everything's out the window, this is the one thing to keep. Some researchers at Ohio State did the most wonderfully nerdy thing. They pulled the 100 most borrowed children's books from the library, counted every last word, and worked out how many words a kid actually hears by kindergarten, depending on how often they get read to. They call it the million word gap. You can Google it.
• 7:57
  A child who has read five books a day arrives at kindergarten having heard around a million and a half more words than a child who has never been read to. A million and a half. And before you spiral, look at the other end of the ladder, one book a day. This still buys your kid close to 300,000 extra words. But remember what kind of books kids are reading pre kindergarten.
• 8:21
  Most of these are picture books. You can go through ten, twenty of these types of books a day easily, but just one book makes a huge difference. Sit with that for a second because it changes the whole game. And the crazy thing is there's no ceiling here with the data. There's no point where the graph flattens and reading stops counting as important or as valuable.
• 8:42
  Every book is more words in the bank. And here's what's really important. The words in books are the fancy words, the rare ones that nobody really reaches for at dinner or in general conversation. Words like weary, peculiar, galloped. I wanna say at least five times a week, our kids say a really crazy word that we don't use in our regular household life, and I know it was because they read it in one of their books.
• 9:10
  And it's always funny when it's a more complicated word and they mispronounce it. That's how I know they learned that word by reading it because they didn't pronounce it correctly. They didn't hear it first. You see, our everyday talk, as much as we love our people and relationship is important, in person communication runs on a surprisingly small pile of words. But books?
• 9:32
  Books keep slipping us the good stuff. There's no downside to reading more. Every page counts, so pile them on. We are not nearly done yet though. When we come back, I'll show you what's happening inside your child's head while they're listening to a story.
• 9:48
  Researchers put little ones in a brain scanner to watch it live, and there's one thing on those scans that changed how I think about reading and also about screen time. I'll see you on the other side. Homeschooling four kids means I'm juggling roughly 24 different subjects at any given time. And a few years back during a particularly busy season, I hit a wall. I needed some serious help with the heavy lifting of teaching everything myself and managing schedules for four kids.
• 10:16
  That's when I found BJU Press Homeschool, and we've loved their courses so much that we keep going back. Some families use them for everything and love it. I use them for certain subjects. Either way, total mental load relief. Here's what my mornings look like now.
• 10:30
  Let us take science for example. My three girls do that one together. They fire up the lesson taught by a real teacher, well produced, actual teaching, not just click through busy work. And I sit there with my coffee, watch them, or make breakfast, and we discuss the big ideas. Every BJU Press homeschool course prioritizes critical thinking, a biblical worldview, and hands on learning.
• 10:50
  I just guide the conversation and pick which activity or pages or projects we want to do, and everything's already planned out. They have an online platform included for you called the homeschool hub, and it keeps everyone on track, both me and my kids, without micromanaging or nagging. And when I have questions, I call my Homeworks consultant. These people don't just help you get set up. They're available for you whenever you need them.
• 11:12
  It's like having a homeschool expert on speed dial. Go to bjupresshomeschool.com or click the link in the show notes to find out more. I wanna talk about homeschool math for a minute, specifically CTC math, who I'm so glad is sponsoring this episode because you need to know about them. I'm picky about curriculum, and there are a few subjects I won't compromise on, and math is on the top of that list. CTC math is what I use with all four of my kids, and it's an excellent k to 12 math program.
• 11:42
  Rigorous, thorough, comprehensive, everything I want my kids to have in their math education, but without all the stress, the tears, and me having to learn long division all over again. Here's what happens at our house now. My kids log in. A real math teacher walks them through the lesson four to nine minutes clear step by step. They do their lesson and finish up with practice problems.
• 12:04
  The program grades them, and I don't have to remember how to do fractions with unlike denominators or where exactly they left off last week, which means I get to be the mom in the room. I can sit nearby, listen in, encourage, fold the laundry, and watch math get done beautifully. Easier on mom? No sacrifice on academics? Yes, please.
• 12:26
  Join me and tens of thousands of homeschool families using CTC math for their go to math curriculum. Links in the show notes. Grab your free trial today, and you'll see why we love it for our kids. Welcome back. Picture a kid listening to a story with no pictures in it.
• 12:43
  A chapter book, no illustrations, and their eyes drift slightly out of focus aimed at kinda that middle distance. You know where they are? They're at the movies, their own movies. There's a whole film rolling behind those eyes cast and lit and directed by a seven year old, and every kid's version is different. Now for a long time, we just assumed that was happening and thought it was sweet, and it is.
• 13:08
  It's great. It's our imagination. We love that. And then somebody actually checked and researched What's going on exactly when this is happening in the brain? Researchers at Cincinnati Children's slid preschoolers into an MRI and played them stories, watching their brain work in real time.
• 13:26
  The kids who got read to at home lit up harder in exactly the regions you'd want. The parts of the brain that pull meaning out of language and the parts that build mental images. So cool. Their brains were practicing seeing the story, building the projector while the projector ran. That word practicing is the whole thing because imagination works like a muscle, and the read aloud is where it does its reps, which is what makes the screen comparison sting a little.
• 13:57
  Okay. Are you ready? I'm gonna hold your hand. I'm gonna hold my own hand. The same lab looked at heavy screen use in young kids and found the opposite footprint, weaker structure in the very wiring that carries language.
• 14:10
  And when they compared an illustrated storybook with the same story animated on a screen, the illustrated one lit the imagination networks up the brightest. The animation had done the imagining for them, Handed the pictures over, finished. Nothing left to build. That is the quiet cost. A screen is generous, but in the worst way for the brain development in this area.
• 14:35
  It gives your kid the dragon fully rendered every scale in place. So the part of them that would have dreamed up its own dragon gets to sit this one out. But what a book does, it hands them a blank screen and says, you draw it. And their brain thrilled picks up the pencil. Okay.
• 14:54
  So now transitioning for a minute because we all know that reading out loud to young kids is great. It's great for their literacy. It's great for their imagination, making the movies in their head. But for all of us, and I don't know if you have been here yet, I certainly have, there's a particular afternoon in our lives and it comes for all of us. Your kid curled up somewhere, you find is reading to themselves.
• 15:18
  Actually reading. Lips not even moving. They're not really decoding. They're turning the pages on their own, and they're devouring a book. It's the coolest thing.
• 15:27
  And your heart does this proud little swell, especially if you're a homeschool family. And you're like, my kid's now a reader, and they love books. This is so cool. And then some of us wonder about a half second later, okay. Well, does this mean that I can hand this part off now?
• 15:44
  Does this mean that I don't need to read out loud anymore? It's a valid question. Right? I get it. And it can be somewhat of a relief when you're carrying your entire household.
• 15:53
  One less thing sounds amazing. Right? The logic goes, they can read now. So my job here is finished, and they can now read on their own, and this is gonna be so cool. And some parents even worry in the other direction that reading to a kid who already can read might make them lazy.
• 16:09
  The research is blunt. Number one, we should not stop reading out loud to our older kids, and two, no, it does not make them lazy. Let me tell you why. See, reading out loud to our older kids, it spills into two kinds of skill. Of course, we know about the literacy skills, the alphabet, the sounds, the decoding, small, finite, learned once and checked off.
• 16:33
  It's like a lock that opens, and then it stays open. And then there are the unconstrained ones, vocabulary, fluency, and deep comprehension. That lets a person follow a long winding grown up thought. Those, they have no finish line. We keep building those our whole entire life.
• 16:52
  Even now in my writing career, I have journals of metaphors and figures of speech that inspire me. I'm still growing in this area. So in terms of, like, conceptualizing reading, of course, decoding you see is the lock. Everything worth reading is behind that door. And this is what reading out loud does to your big kid that they can't do alone.
• 17:14
  You see, the book that you read to them is harder than the ones that they pick for themselves. Bigger ideas, longer sentences, richer words, all of it landing while they get to just listen and reach with you. What you're doing when you're reading out loud to your older kids is you're giving the fluent reader a lift to ground that their own two feet can't reach yet. Think of it as like lifting them up to the new ledge. That's why reading out loud isn't just for little kids, and researchers have known this since 1985.
• 17:44
  Researchers have concluded that the single most important activity that you can do is keep reading out loud. Don't stop. Even after they can read on their own, all the way up through the grades and most days. I'll never forget this story. So back when I was going through graduate school, I taught seventh grade English literature and history.
• 18:07
  And I remember one of the assigned books was Beowulf. And, you know, it's a fun short read. And I remember having all of the kids, they were all seventh graders, push the desks aside. We all had those, like, single desks. We pushed them to the side, and I put them in a reading circle, kinda like what they have in kindergarten and preschool.
• 18:27
  And in the most animated, crazy way possible, I read Beowulf out loud. Now the really cool thing is is I was in Los Angeles for a very long time. So a lot of these kids, I knew kind of going all through their grades. And I wanna tell you something. When they came back to me or saw me out at the store or saw me at church or something other other, they would often tell me, I remember you read Beowulf out loud, and that was so fun and so cool.
• 18:57
  And I remember as a teacher, it being risky. Like, these are seventh graders who wanna be so cool. Are they gonna like this? And after the first day when they were just sitting there and they were just enthralled and staring at me and their eyes were big, I realized, wow. These kids are eating this up.
• 19:13
  They're always gonna remember this story. And they did. And then added to that, you know, with Lincoln who's now in high school, as you guys know, he's not required to do the morning time that I do with the girls. There's kind of a large age gap. I can't tell you how many times I see him standing in the corner or if he's doing his chores, he's right where he can hear me reading out loud to the girls.
• 19:36
  A book that I've already read out loud to him, and he's there listening again. He's even come to me and said, oh my goodness. I got so much more out of hearing that than the first time I read it. So why do kids actually love being read to? Now I assumed I knew it's enthralling.
• 19:53
  The adult is doing the heavy lifting. Why wouldn't they love that? Then I researched for this episode today why kids love being read to. We'll get into that right after the break. Is your child struggling with attention, memory, reading, writing, or math?
• 20:09
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• 20:42
  Use code HOME 50 for $50 off your cognitive skills assessment. Go to learningrx.com or click the link in the show notes. I have to tell you about something because it falls squarely in the category of things I wish someone had told me sooner. Real quick sponsor moment. Don't fast forward.
• 20:58
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• 21:06
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• 22:07
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• 22:18
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• 22:29
  And when you call, they will walk you through everything. Make sure to tell them that you're a listener of the show because I want you to have the VIP treatment. Summithealthshare.com, link is in the show notes. Welcome back. So let's talk about the part the kids themselves keep trying to tell us.
• 22:44
  When you ask children how they feel about being read to, something surprising happens. More than eight in ten kids say they love it or liked it a lot, every age of them, right up through teenage years. And a solid four in ten of the older ones, the very kids that we all think are too big for this, they say they wish their parents had never stopped. And when they were asked why, the answer was the closeness. It was time with you, time with me, time with us.
• 23:18
  That's the whole thing. What kids love about being read aloud to is the connection time. So what reading out loud to our kids really is is time with us. Did you know that when kids are read to regularly, they tend toward less aggression, having more empathy, they have an easier time with the soft skills of reading a room, and they are more in tune with other people's feelings. Now, this does have a lot to do with other people's point of view and story, but don't discount the fact that it is time and connection with the adult who's reading to them as well.
• 23:52
  Sitting shoulder to shoulder inside the same story. That does something to a person. This is why I love family together subjects and family together read alouds. We can all explore the same story and the same characters and grapple with really hard things together. We can ask big questions together.
• 24:11
  That is such a gift. Homeschool moms and dads listening today, we hold this one thing that school can never schedule, a couch, an unhurried day, and no bell about to ring. We can get lost in story with our kids, and nobody is better placed to give reading back its first and best job than us. How cool. Isn't that great?
• 24:35
  So tonight or tomorrow, pick up that book that's a little too hard for them to read on their own and slightly too long for you and read the first chapter to your kids. If you have to start with five minutes, do it. You can stretch. Your muscles can grow. Take it from me who really struggled with this in the beginning, it was hard, but you do get better at it.
• 24:55
  And once you do, we can watch their faces. And that kid's face enveloped in a story and connecting with you, that's the data that I care about for your family. And that's what I want for you. And that's what builds strong resilient kids. A beautiful, loving home with a caring parent.
• 25:12
  Okay. So I'm getting a little emotional. That's okay. I tend to do that because it's just this connection time with our kids is just so important and beautiful. And the benefits of it, just honestly, they pass through generations.
• 25:25
  Now before we move on, I wanna say thank you so much for being here. And as you know, our sponsors are what makes this podcast free to you. Now let me ask you, if you have gotten any value from today's show, the best way to say thank you is simply to engage with the show on whatever platform you're on. If you're not subscribed yet, please do that first and put on the notification to get the bell when a new episode drops. We love comments.
• 25:50
  Please make a comment. Send this show to a friend. Maybe do three things today just to say thank you for the show. And the reason why I asked that is because it's the robots behind the screen that decide if a show is worth putting in front of more eyeballs. And the way that happens is completely free to you, and it makes a huge difference if that's simply your engagement with the show.
• 26:10
  Plus, we love reading your comments. So maybe you were doing that right as I was talking. A lot of you tell me that you do that already. You know when this part of the show comes up and you just do your little thing. Anyway, I appreciate it so much.
• 26:20
  Thank you in advance. Plus, I love seeing you guys show up for each other in the comments. It's just really cool to watch. You know how when you meet another homeschool family and you end up talking for, like, an hour? Swapping recommendations, sharing what's working, telling them about the pediatrician who actually gets it, where to get the best deal on sprouted flour.
• 26:39
  That's how we just are. We take care of each other. That's the whole idea behind The Christy-Faith List. It's a directory of all types of businesses and organizations who share our values and want to work with homeschool families, and it is always free to search. All those recommendations were always passing around.
• 26:57
  Now they're all in one place. And if you're a business owner or part of an organization that loves homeschooling families and you want business from us, sign yourself up. We want to know who you are. We want to give you business. There's nothing like finding a homeschool friendly something or other out there in the wild.
• 27:14
  Support the people who support you at the christyfaithlist.com. We started with the question, should we be reading to our kids? And I'm sure it was confirmation for you to hear what you probably already knew. It is one of the most settled questions in all of education. There is no debate over whether or not it's good to read out loud to kids.
• 27:35
  It is a good thing to do. It has the highest return, and there is no ceiling on it. It does not expire. There is no time where you should stop. And the kid who's curled up next to you on the couch have been telling us this the entire time that they absolutely love it.
• 27:52
  They love being close to you. They love you taking the time to enjoy a story with them. A shared experience is a beautiful thing. So if you carry one thing out of here today, let it be this. Reading is absolutely worth it.
• 28:05
  If you do nothing in your homeschool day, keep that read aloud. Its weight is heavier than all the other subjects, and give yourself permission to enjoy it. There's a line I returned to on this from Emily Buckwald, a woman who spent her entire life making children's books. She said children are made readers on the laps of their parents, on the laps of people who love them. That's the whole argument in eight words.
• 28:32
  I loved her quote so much. I put it on a note card for you to download completely for free. You can tuck it in the front of whatever you're reading right now. You can use it as a bookmark. You can put it on the window sill over the sink, dashboard, on your mirror, on your coffee maker, doesn't matter, but it is for you to be reminded of the importance of reading out loud to your kids and to remember to enjoy it.
• 28:56
  I'll put that link in the show notes. If this show stirred something up in you, I got some other episodes that you might enjoy as well. If screens currently are the low grade war in your house, please tune in to episode one zero seven where I get into info and research on screen time. And if the deeper ache here is that you don't want anything stealing your kid's love of learning, go and listen to episode 61 titled, are schools killing a love of learning? News flash, yes, they are, but I explain why.
• 29:27
  And if you're new here and you want the version of me with the guard all the way down, spilling my guts, my vulnerability series is the place to start. That one kicks off at episode 92. A link for all of these is in the show notes. Before you go, one more thing, because I don't wanna leave you with just a reading tip and a wave. If this type of thing and this type of thinking and learning about all the research floats your boat, I wanna invite you to check out Thrive Homeschool Community.
• 29:56
  It's where we train women and give you the community that you need to homeschool well and do right by your kids. If you are a homeschool mom exhausted from piecing it all together yourself, the late night searches, the conflicting advice all over the internet, and constantly wondering if you're doing this homeschool thing right, I want you to know that Thrive Homeschool Community is where all of that second guessing and self doubt ends. It's where you actually learn to homeschool well. I think it's the best thing to happen in homeschooling in the last decade. It is what I wished I had when I started homeschooling, and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I built it.
• 30:34
  You can check the link to see if we're open. And if not, please get on the waitlist. I make sure to treat my waitlisters like VIPs, and you will get an email when we are about to open. So make sure to do that if that is what you need. And before you go, please know that I wanna hear from you.
• 30:50
  I love your emails. I love your comments on the show. I love how you come together and help other moms, and I love your sharing. What's been your favorite read aloud that you've done with your kids? What's the one book you remember as a child that an adult read to you that still sits with you today?
• 31:10
  Please share those things. I'm dying to know, and other moms are too. We always want good book recommendations and to hear how your life has been changed through reading. I can't wait to see the comments on this episode. And if you have a personal question about your own homeschooling, please email us.
• 31:28
  We read every single comment and every single email. Thanks for being here. Now, go read something out loud to somebody you love. I'll see you next time. Bye.