Researchers Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D., conducted nearly 10 years of research to learn why some children perform better than others in school; they published their findings in the book Meaningful Differences. According to the book, the answer is words. The quantity of talk and interactions that parents had with their child, explained Hart and Risley, predicted a child’s IQ and vocabulary size more so than any other variable, including parents’ education or socioeconomic status.
Hi Melodym37,
Your posts show you are a very good grandmother that wishes to do the very best for her grandchild. I like that.
I first learnt about the book ‘Meaningful Differences’ by Hart and Risley, from Jim Trelease (the read-aloud guru), on his website
http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah-ch1-pg3.html. PLEASE READ THAT WEBPAGE CAREFULLY. It is an excerpt from chapter 1 of Trelease’s best-selling book- The Read Aloud Handbook. Trelease marks the book Meaningful Differences as 'Top Secret'.
Trelease also says:
``If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, Meaningful Differences would be the one. And that's feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article for American Educator (Spring, 2003), the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by schools.’’
If possible, get the book ‘Meaningful Differences’ via interlibrary loan. The book is one of the most cited researches on early childhood literacy. I have read the book, learnt a lot, and changed my parenting practices accordingly. Then get Trelease ‘Read-Aloud Handbook’. First read the book’s excerpts on the website I gave above, and then get the whole book from your local library.
The major point I got from Trelease’s book was that by reading aloud, you expose the child to more complex vocabulary than if you were talking all day long. Yes, talk is very good for babies, and I talk a lot to mine, but reading aloud fills in the gaps and introduces the child to rarer words than are found in our daily vocabularies. And you don’t always have to buy the books you’ll read aloud to your grandson, get them FREE from your local library.
Here is the link to the six-page summary of the Hart-Risley research (which Trelease mentioned) published in American Educator :
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2003/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf.
PLEASE READ IT. On Google Scholar, this six-page article by Hart and Risley has been cited 225 times by other researchers, so it must be quite influential.
Digg
