New study shows how reading benefits toddlers’ brains
WHAT’S the best way to improve a child’s school results across the board? What if there could be one intervention that skyrockets a child’s progress in every area of their lives?
As it turns out, there is a gamechanger: books.
Policy experts, educational specialists and statisticians all agree: a child who reads is a child who learns.
A new study by Dr Lisa Scott in the Brian, Cognition and Development Lab at the University of Florida has made exciting new progress in learning just how books affect babies’ brains.
Scott’s study tracked infants over a period of six months, using a cap with 128 electronic sensors to map electric neural responses in their brains while they were shown pictures of monkeys on a screen.
The babies were divided into three groups – those whose parents would read them special stories with named monkey characters, those whose parents read them books with the same pictures but where the monkeys were not named individually, and those whose parents did not read them anything to do with monkeys at all. Results were startling.
After three months of reading the stories, the brain activity levels showed that the children who had been read the special stories clearly recognised the characters again.
Even for children as young as six months, researchers found a remarkable increase in attention span, recognition and engagement in children who had seen the pictures before.
Even more exciting, there was a clear difference in brain function between those children who learned general tags like “monkey” and those whose books gave the monkey a name.
This result has big implications – it means that we can prove very small children recognise characters, are able to use labels to describe the world around them and respond to familiar things.
What does this mean for South African children?
The short answer is: a challenge. Books are expensive and disposable income is tight – what’s published depends on what makes publishers the most profit.
How many children’s stories have you seen in isiZulu, let alone Sepedi?
Fortunately, things are changing. Organisations like Nal’ibali and Book Dash are committed to providing free, high quality reading material to children in all of our country’s languages.
Their websites are absolute treasure troves of downloadable stories – all of which can be downloaded for free.
Earlier this month, in fact, 11 entirely new, entirely free stories have been added to the Book Dash website – all with great new African content. keep an eye out for Lauren Beukes’
And Also! and Sam Wilson’s Tig’s World. You can download all of the children’s stories for free
For more information about the Nal’ibali campaign, or to access children’s stories in a range of South African languages, visit: