Why 'active' story time helps a child's development

Research over the years shows consistently that children whose parents read stories to them from a young age show better language skills than those who don’t have a ‘story time’.

Listening to stories is obviously a fun way for children to spend quality time with parents but those stories lay the foundation for language and literacy development. It also has social and emotional benefits.

Recently, Fufy Damissie, writing for The Conversation, said that full benefits of story time can be gained by having children involved in what’s known as ‘dialogic reading’. This is where adults (parents and teachers) engage in conversations with the child about the story. Rather than being passive listeners, having the children think about the characters and the storyline deepens their knowledge and understanding and can teach them critical and creative thinking skills from an early age.

Questions can include what the child remembers about the story (memory skills), asking why a character acted in a certain way, how the character might feel in a certain situation and what other behaviours could a character have chosen to alter the outcome of a story.

A wealth of evidence has highlighted the significance of these kinds of conversations during story time. It has benefits for reading enjoyment, reading motivation, parent-child attachment and parental confidence.

Dialogic reading affects children’s vocabulary as well as their literacy outcomes. One particular study divided 36 children with vocabulary delays into groups taking part in shared reading or shared dialogic reading. While both groups showed improvements, the dialogic reading group had significantly larger gains in vocabulary. In addition, it helps to develop young children’s ‘oracy’, which is the ability to articulate ideas when speaking, listen carefully and communicate effectively.

Fufy Damissie conducted a research project, entitled Talk with Tales for Children to help improve early years teachers’ skills in using dialogic reading techniques with three- and four-year-olds. The program uses traditional tales, such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In addition to questions such as “what can you see on this page?” and “what happened next?”, practitioners are also encouraged to ask questions that provoke children’s thinking. These include “would it be good or bad to eat someone else’s porridge?” and “was Goldilocks brave?”

The early findings suggest that high-quality training through this program has improved early years teachers and practitioners’ interactions during shared reading and enhanced children’s listening and attention, thinking skills and enjoyment of and engagement with stories.

The language, social, and emotional benefits of story time mean it should be seen as a fundamental part of the early years curriculum and a practice at home that is a regular part of the daily routine.

Provided by The Conversation

Image provided by Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.