The importance of reading aloud … to your younger sibling

Claire Armitstead in the Guardian this week writes about the importance of elder siblings reading aloud to their younger brother and sisters.

It’s about behaviour modelling and it’s about competition. You see what the elder sister is doing and, particularly if you’re the youngest child (not that I’m over empathising at all here!), you want to do it better. I need to have a look and see if anybody’s actually done any academic research into this area. The key thing seems to be that reading aloud, regardless of who does it, is continually being shown to be an effective and powerful away of increasing literacy skills. Remember as well that it doesn’t need to be some highbrow literary thriller – it can be a comic, the tv magazine or the newspaper. The important thing is to do it together.