How to Raise a Voracious Reader | Harvard Graduate School of Education:
As we gather around the family table for festive holiday banquets or low-key daily suppers, we’re nourishing our minds as much as our bodies, says Anne Fishel, cofounder of the Family Dinner Project, housed under the Project Zero umbrella at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In fact, regular family dinner may be a more powerful vocabulary-builder for young kids than reading.
A large body of research — much of which arises from the pioneering literacy work of HGSE Professor Catherine Snow — has shown that rare or sophisticated words are the building blocks of a robust vocabulary in children. And it turns out that rare words — those that don’t appear on an age-defined list of 3,000 common words — show up more often at the dinner table than they do in the picture books we read to our children, says Fishel, an associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.
A 2006 paper by Snow and Diane Beals found that children between the ages of three and five heard about 140 rare words when caregivers read aloud to them from picture books. At the dinner table, they heard about a thousand rare words. “That was the real jackpot,” Fishel says. “Kids who have bigger vocabularies learn to read more easily and earlier, because they can decipher the meaning of more words when they’re reading.”
And it’s not just listening to words – it’s using them to explain, remember, and tell stories.
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