Benefits of Reading for Students

The notion that children should be taught to read as early as possible is gaining traction across homes and schools. It is obvious that a child who learns to read early on and continues to read regularly will develop excellent reading skills.

However, teaching children how to read imparts various other benefits that become apparent in their school life. Following are just a few ways in which extensive reading can help students in their academics:

• Improves vocabulary and language – While reading, children subconsciously imbibe a lot of new words and phrases. They also absorb the mechanics of different types of sentence structures and other features without needing any specific instructions. This reflects directly in their speech and writing.
• Increases concentration – With regular reading, children learn to sit still for longer periods and their inherent restlessness will reduce. This develops into a concentrated ability to focus on specific tasks and patiently see them to completion.
• Enhances knowledge – As the children read more and more, they find out many new things about the world around them. In fact, reading about diverse topics will expose them to people, places and things that they would never experience otherwise. The general knowledge reflects in their academic performance too.
• Boosts imagination – Children who have the reading habit are found to be very creative and expressive. This is because they are always imagining about the people and events they read about in books. The words and descriptions paint a vivid picture in their minds which comes to the fore in their studies too.
• Deeper analysis - Regular readers are known to have a remarkable capacity for reflection as they are used to deliberating upon what they have read. This level of contemplation passes on to academic reading as well.
• Develops confidence – A child who is well-read will be more self-assured in his behavior and approach. This self-assurance will make the children more open to trying new things and participating in school activities.
• Thirsty for knowledge – Regular reading activates a deep love for learning in young children. They have a wide variety of interests and want to know more and more about everything in the world. This in fact encourages them to read more books about diverse topics.
• Become self-learners – Reading fine-tunes the children’s intellectual capacity to such an extent that they become independent learners who can understand things on their own. Their comprehension skills are at the peak and they can grasp complex subjects much more easily than students who are not as interested in reading. All they need is some guidance at best.

In sum, teaching children how to read early makes them avid readers and sets the stage for fine academic success. Their impulse to read manifests as a genuine interest in studies, not just language but other subjects as well.

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Reading to Writing Goes Vice Versa

What is the most important skill you want your child to learn?

Most new parents will immediately think of reading and writing. In fact, parents of toddlers spend the formative years of their child fretting about how to teach their child to read and write as soon as possible.

The anxiety is justified as reading and writing skills dictate the future academic performance of a child. It can lead to difficulties in reading and be expressing the language in the future.

No wonder so many techniques for teaching children to read have come into play. Some focus the attention on teaching the alphabets and their sounds while others make the whole word important. Therefore, the former is all about phonics while the latter uses flash cards to increase children’s familiarity with different words.

However, none of the popular reading techniques emphasize writing skills per se. In fact, writing comes into the picture later as it is assumed that a child will slowly transition to being able to write once he can read.

But at the moment we are on the cusp of a mini revolution as the Ziff method turns the reading techniques on their head by first teaching the toddlers to write. The focus is never on teaching reading skills, but the best part is that the children learn to read very quickly and very well at that.

Therefore, Ziff Technique ‘From Writing to Reading’ emerges as both the best way to teach reading and the best way to teach writing too!

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