Reading offers numerous benefits for a child's development. It fosters a wide range of skills, supporting learning, building connections with the world, understanding emotions, and exploring stories and history.
Reading helps harness better concentration and memory. Engaging with a story, its characters, and its plot is an excellent way for children to practice focus in an interactive manner. Skills like concentration and attention are crucial for students, who spend many hours each day listening to and interacting with peers and teachers. To follow a story, a child needs to recall key details.
Spending just 20 minutes a day reading can expose children to over 1.8 million words in a year. This leads to a richer vocabulary and provides them with more ways to express themselves. This will help in other subject areas of learning given that English is the medium for the other lessons.
Independent reading time directly affects school achievement and test score success. One study in 2016 found that students who choose to read for fun performed better in all subjects, including STEM subjects. The study’s authors pointed to reading comprehension and critical thinking skills gleaned from reading as a key reason for their higher performance.
When a student gets lost in a book, their imagination turns on. They’re transported to a far-off world, a different time in history, or another person’s life. They form mental images of the characters and settings. All of this creates a greater sense of wonder and creativity.
Often, the creativity sparked by reading books shows up in other forms of communication. Readers are often excellent creative writers. They may become skilled communicators. It all starts with falling in love with books at a young age.
At Astor, reading is a top priority. Each week, at least one English lesson is dedicated to a range of reading activities aimed at reaping the associated benefits. These activities include summaries, comprehension tasks, dramatizations, vocabulary building, inferencing, character analysis, and more. Students are given reading materials tailored to their individual skill levels, allowing them to progress at their own pace. Their reading levels are reviewed each term to motivate them to move up to more challenging texts.
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