The importance of reading to your children if you want them to be great writers

Hello readers,


I recently purchased the Primary Arts of Language K-2 programme for writing which came with a lecture by Andrew Pudewa about the 4 languages of Arts which is listening, speaking reading and writing. The lecture is very, very interesting and well worth listening to.

The first thing that stands out to me the most in this lecture is the importance of reading to your children which I always new would help in when it came to teaching your children to read but I did not correlate it to helping them to become excellent writers and communicators. The one thing through this lecture that is repeated over and over again is the importance of reading aloud to children above their reading level and reading to them until they are in at least in high school or refuse to have you read to them anymore.

So why read to children above their reading level? Pudewa suggest that even if the child does not understand what is being read it allows the child to hear new language, new ways of writing sentences and paragraphs, syntax and grammar. It also ables the parent and the child to discuss what is gong on in the book. It also stretches the child as a reader and does not allow them to get stuck at one Reading level for the rest of their life.  I also love the idea of reading to my children and having the words of a beautiful book wash over them and just have a trickle down effect over my child.

Pudewa also believed that reading aloud to your children also helps in the development of good listening skills. A skill sadly today majority of us lack even as adults. Pudewa blamed the busyness of life as the enemy to poor listening skills because we no longer have the time to devote to reading aloud anymore. Listening is one of the fundamentals of becoming an excellent communicator because without decent listening skills you can not form a decent argument or debate

So how do you help your child to become a great communicator/writer

• Read, read, read to your child as much as you possibly can
• Read classic books and build your children up to longer texts here is a list
• Don't just read books read articles from well written and respected magazines and journals.

Hope this inspires you to get reading with your kids.

Happy Learning

Kimba.