I started to read when I was 8 years old. Well, when I was 8 I had read some books, but nothing serious. When I say that I started to read at 8 is because when I started I didn't stop. The first books I read were the Harry Potter ones, then Idhun Memoirs, and then lots and lots of books more, it was a non-stop since I was 15. I read everyday in every chance I had, mainly fantasy books. I have to admit that this is a bit insane, i read too many hours a day, but I don't regret. Well, since then I have thought a lot on how reading can affect a kid and it's development, and I think this gives lots of advantages to a kid:
- Learning how language works.
- If the reader gets inside the book deeply, he undertands diffferent ways of thinking and we sees different problems with their respective solutions.
- It gives a strong imagination: when the reader visualises the images in his head, or when he just tryes to imagine a landscape he is not actually seeing, he is improving his visual memory and his spatial intelligence (what by the way is really useful).
- Reading like this means that the reader will put less interest in some activities, like watching the TV or playing videogames, the most common activities in nowadays kids.
- Reading means learning, history, phisics and even politics. I say even politics because usually people don't think on this, but in fact in every story where is shown how any living beign organises is telling something about politics. An extreme example is every book written by Ken Follet, but well, it's not really a good book for a kid.
- One last advantage. Fantasy books related with magic often contain passages about learning how to control one's mind. A curious kid is going to try this kind of things, mental exercices that, I can not tell exactly how, but can be useful. For example, 'Eragon' learns to control his thought and just think on one thing during a period of time, not easy. Now imagine a kid trying stuff like this; I have the feeling that it helps somehow, maybe in concentration or abstraction.
In conclusion, I think that reading is a good thing for a kid. I'm sure that all those thing together can help the kid in a lot of situations: having fun where there's nothing, a quick understanding on problems and solving them faster, empathy, more connections between thoughts... But the most important for me is the power of the imagination in a kid.
This image shows perfectly what I mean:
Books and writters, thank you all.
7. Kids who are used to read, eventually learn to disconnect from the reality for a while and replace the pice of mind that is often worried by problems or preocupations by another one that let them fly away from this world into another one developed entirely by their pure imagination where they can always pass a great time.
ReplyDeleteI've seen you ilustrating this with an image and I thought, yeah, a picture tells more than thousand words, but sometimes it is more thankful to read that amount of words and feel somthing with every one of them. ;)