It’s easy for a parent to become overwhelmed with emotions and expectations as a child grows up and gets ready for that first day of school. As the day nears for the beginning of preschool or kindergarten, the anxiety levels can climb, and the inevitable questions arise: Is she ready for this? Will he do well? We are all concerned that our children do well in the long run and succeed in school. In recent years, parents and professionals have become more aware that early childhood literacy is a key to a success in the classroom, and on into adulthood.
Children introduced to reading early on tend to read earlier and excel in school compared to children who are not exposed to language and books at a young age. The National Institute for Literacy estimates that one out of every five children in the U.S. will experience a reading or writing problem at some point during their school years.
Understanding Literacy
What is literacy? Simply put, it is our ability to read and write and learn. It’s been said that we spend the first few years of our lives learning to read, and the rest of our lives reading to learn. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), good literacy skills include being able to read and understand age-appropriate information (comprehension), put letters together to form words (spelling), and write meaningful phrases and sentences.
As with many other aspects of a child’s growth, his literacy level is affected by genetics and environment. The genes a child inherits from her parents determine her brain’s basic “wiring,” while the home environment she grows up within helps determine how efficiently the “wires” are connected, and how well she adapts to the world around her.
Inside the Brain
In order to get a better grasp on this, we can look at the brain’s basic anatomy. The nervous system begins to operate very early in a developing fetus. Less than a month after conception, the neurological system’s basic structure is already established, and brain cells begin to form.
Each brain cell gradually sprouts hundreds of long branches called “dendrites” which connect to other brain cells via junctions called “synapses.” The electrical impulses our brain uses to send messages to the rest of the body are carried along these branches along a fatty sheath called “myelin” that covers the branches like bark on a tree. Chemicals called “neurotransmitters” help transfer the electrical pulses across our synapses to other branches. As an old saying goes, “Cells that fire together, wire together.” This “hard-wiring” of our brains continues throughout fetal development as the number of synapses continues to increase, peaking in the early years of our lives. The process declines by one-third between early childhood and adolescence.
