Daily Reading in a COVID-19 World
Shared reading has many benefits, including increasing your child’s interest in books, building the relationship between oral language and printed language, and promoting story comprehension. A recent study suggests that daily shared reading may be more important now than ever before. A study released in September 2020 utilized data from kindergarteners’ reading scores over summer break to estimate the impact of COVID-19 school closures. Their model estimated that these children may have lost one-third of the reading skills they would have learned in school. The authors did acknowledge that this model does not account for the possible impact of remote learning on reading gains. The good news is, the Boston researchers also found that children who are read to daily