I recently returned from a Brain Research Summit that reviewed over the course of three days brain growth and development. Parents of young children can greatly enhance their child's development by creating the following practices regularly in their home:
1. Read orally to children from birth on a daily basis. The sounds heard during reading develops brain processes eventually builidng into memory, attention and sequencing development. Only 50% of all infants are routinely read to by their parents. Literally, the oral language can drive the brain's "architecture" within.
2. Words need to be spoken regularly within the household. Infants hearing oral language develop the same processes seen in being read to on a regular basis. Noisey toys do not take the place of healthy oral interaction and positive play.
3. Households with higher number of words heard per hour also create more affirmations for the infant than prohibitions. It is a more positive environment for language development and is noticeably lower in households with fewer words spoken hourly. This appears to be driven by socio-economic factors (SES) with higher SES homes having more words with more affirmations on an hourly basis. As SES decreases words are less with more prohibitions than affirmations on an hourly basis.
4. Children lacking early birth - age 5 brain development can have a "gap" that builds to over five years by the age of fifteen - called "auditory processing disorder" that can be mistaken for ADHD. This becomes even more apparent in school classrooms as over 80% of instruction is "oral" language.
5. Students establishing early reading fluency with comprehension will read up to 65 minutes a day (4,358,000 words per year) a year compared to the students in the 30th percentile averaging 1.8 minutes a day reading (106,000 words per year). Increasing by only 8 minutes a day will take student to 70 percentile (622,000 words per year).
Generally, as reading fluency strengthens so will student accuracy and comprehension of materials read. Fluency becomes a strong predictor of student performance.
