IST 605: Reading Aloud To Your Children

This "Family Guide" is a resource created by the publishing company Scholastic to help parents and guardians understand the importance of books and reading aloud. The guide includes data from Scholastic's Kids and Family Reading Report survey, which reports on subjects such as parent and child attitudes toward reading aloud and the ways that parents use books to help their children. The web page also includes links to related pages that describe the benefits of reading aloud and what it should look like as your child ages.

While a publishing company would be naturally biased toward encouraging families to read, Scholastic provides information and helpful advice that aligns with other resources on the subject. In addition, the data from their survey helps to put the importance of reading aloud into perspective. Lastly, the links to additional resources that are included throughout the "Family Guide" are a convenient way to gain awareness of resources for further research.

Based on averages from 2023, this interactive graph shows the "Average hours per day parents spent caring for and helping household children as their main activity." One of the caring activities on the graph is "Reading to and with household children." This graph provides several opportunities for comparison such as:

• Comparing time spent reading to children to the time spent on other activities
• Comparing time spent reading to children at different ages
• Comparing time spent reading to children for both parents, just fathers, and just mothers

Some calculations will need to be done to determine the exact amount of time parents spend reading to their children per day since it is reported in hundredths of an hour. That being said, the visual nature of the data is enough to reveal valuable information, such as the fact that the amount of time differs between parents and decreases as children get older. The rest of the resources in this guide reveal why these numbers should increase in the future.