Children are human sponges, soaking up all the sights and sounds that surround them -- perhaps in even more ways than we initially thought.
Today's piece from Motoko Rich in the New York Times is well worth the read if you're at all invested in kids, education, and literacy. "Language-Gap Study Bolsters a Push for Pre-K" highlights new research that showed how, "at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew — 'dog' or 'ball' — much faster than children from low-income families." And even more, "by age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes."
In short? The gap between affluent and lower-income children keeps widening.
And that's where Pre-K comes in, some argue. This month the National Governor's Association called on states to get kids reading proficiently by third grade and urged lawmakers to increase access to Pre-K.
The idea of an increasingly important Pre-K is not new to Scholastic — indeed, we're the only publisher mentioned in the story. Take a look at our Big Day for Pre-K program, which we've offered for three years.
But meanwhile, what next steps can we take? Rich notes that "literacy experts emphasize the importance of natural conversations with children, asking questions while reading books, and helping children identify words during playtime." What do you think? What's the role of Pre-K?
