How many words did you know when you were three years old? If you knew that the strength of your adult vocabulary would be predicated on your three year old vocabulary would you have looked at words differently then? Will you look any differently at three year olds and their world of words now?
The urgency for developing word power for your children has been an under the radar work in progress for many educators. Social research and in-school observations support declarations that children of poverty and familial distress suffer many disadvantages when they enter school. One of the most significant learning disadvantages is their lack of word power – they are underexposed to vocabulary. Now, the Clinton Foundation and the Next Generation project have joined to form the Too Small To Fail initiative to improve the health and well-being of pre-school aged children. A part of their work addresses the word gap that burdens children of poverty.
“In fact, there is a startling gap between highly educated parents and less educated parents in the amount of time that parents spend talking to, reading to and engaging in other activities with their young children that support cognitive development. Robert Putnam and Evrim Alintas call this “Goodnight Moon” time, and their forthcoming research indicates that while “Goodnight Moon” time has increased for all families, it has increased most dramatically for those families with more highly educated parents. In the 1960s and 1970s, highly educated and less educated parents were spending similar amounts of time reading to their children; yet in 2010-2012, the total gap between high- and low-educated mothers’ and fathers’ time spent on “Goodnight Moon” activities was more than half an hour daily.8 This gap adds up over weeks, months and years to a significant gap in time investment in young children.
A key result of this gap is a troubling difference in children’s early vocabularies. Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that by age four, children in professional families had heard an average of 30 million more words addressed to them than children in families on welfare, and 15 million more words than working-class families. This means that children from lower-income and even middle-class families often enter school with substantially smaller vocabularies than many of their peers. Unfortunately, inequities on display in preschool and kindergarten largely persist throughout life. Most of the high school achievement gap between poor, middle-income and wealthy students is already visible by kindergarten. And the children who have weak pre-literacy and numeracy skills in kindergarten are, on average, the same children with weak vocabulary and math skills in seventh grade. Similar trends can be seen when it comes to life skills: discrepancies in attention span during preschool predict relative levels of academic persistence, earnings, and family stability, even 20 and 30 years later. These lasting effects are no surprise: New brain research also shows how adverse childhood experiences linked to poverty can harm the development of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with the ability to pay attention, exhibit self-control, organize and plan.”
Percentage of children ages 3–5 who were read to 3 or more times in the last week by a family member by mother’s education, selected years 1993–2007
Give pre-school children a boost for a life time – teach them more words.
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2s2f_framingreport_v2r3.pdf