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Literacy Facts

• Parents should pay careful attention to three potential reading slump times that can hinder a child's reading development: when a child enters kindergarten; at grade 4; and when a child enters high school. (How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life, Paul Kropp, 2000).

• Children who were read to at least three times a week by a family member were almost twice as likely to score in the top 25% in reading than children who were read to less than 3 times a week. (Denton, Kristen and Gerry West, Children's Reading and Mathematics Achievement in Kindergarten and First Grade, 2002).

• Reading to children more than once a day has a substantial positive impact on their future academic skills. In addition, research indicates children with early exposure to books and reading are better at performing mathematical tasks. (National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, Statistics Canada, 1996-1997)
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• Start early. Children aged 2 to 3 who are read to several times a day do substantially better in kindergarten at the age of 4 and 5 than youngsters who are read to only a few times a week or less. (National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, Statistics Canada, 1996-1997).

• Simple things like reading and telling stories to a child at 18 months are powerful stimuli for brain development in the early years. (Early Years Study Final Report: Reversing the Real Brain Drain, Government of Ontario, 1999).

• 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate. The only behavior measure that correlates significantly with reading scores is the number of books in the home. (Jeff McQuillan, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions, 1998). According to UNICEF, "Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names and two thirds of them are women." Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The Department of Justice states, "The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure." Over 70% of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level. Children who have not developed some basic literacy skills by the time they enter school are 3 - 4 times more likely to drop out in later years. (National Adult Literacy Survey, (1002) NCES, U.S. Department of Education).

• Out-of-school reading habits of students has shown that even 15 minutes a day of independent reading can expose students to more than a million words of text in a year. (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988). In a class of 20 students, few if any teachers can find even 5 minutes of time in a day to devote to reading with each student. (Adams, 2002).

• Students who reported having all four types of reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias) in their home scored, on average, higher than those who reported having fewer reading materials. (The Nation's Report Card: Fourth-Grade Reading 2000, April 2001, The National Center for Education Statistics).

• Good readers in 5th grade may read 10 times as many words as poor readers over a school year. (Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America).

• First grade children with good word recognition skills were exposed to almost twice as many words in their basal readers as were children who had poor word recognition skills. (Juel, 1988).

• There are almost half a million words in our English Language - the largest language on earth, incidentally - but a third of all our writing is made up of only twenty-two words. (Paul Kropp, "The Reading Solution")