Sarah (00:00):

We are avid fans of reading aloud. We do it for connection, we do it for academic purposes, we do it because we love our kids, we love stories, and we know it’s one of the greatest gifts we can give our children. But what impact does reading aloud have on a child’s brain structurally, physically? We’re talking about it today on this episode of the Read-Aloud Revival.

 

(00:29):

You are listening to the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Mackenzie, homeschooling mama of six and author of The Read-Aloud Family and Teaching From Rest.

 

(00:40):

As parents, we’re overwhelmed with a lot to do. It feels like every child needs something different. The good news is you are the best person to help your kids learn and grow, and home is the best place to fall in love with books. This podcast has been downloaded seven million times in over 160 countries, so if you want to nurture warm relationships while also raising kids who love to read, you’re in good company. We’ll help your kids fall in love with books, and we’ll help you fall in love with homeschooling. Let’s get started.

 

(01:20):

Today, I’ve got a special guest here, Dr. John Hutton, who is a pediatrician and the director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. His research will shed some light for us on what happens in our children’s brains when we read aloud to them. What physically, structurally happens as seen on an MRI? It’s kind of amazing.

 

(01:47):

Before we get there, though, it’s the end of February, which means we are knocking on the door of spring, as I look out the window and see it does not look anything like spring. For some of us who live where it’s super cold, we’re not really knocking on anything yet. But spring is around the corner, they tell us, even if it doesn’t quite look like it outside your window.

 

(02:07):

You know one of my very favorite things to do at the beginning of a new season is tell you about what’s coming next in our Family Book Clubs and WOW: Writers on Writing workshops and all of our lineup at RAR Premium. RAR Premium is our online community that helps your kids fall in love with books and helps you fall in love with homeschooling. We do this through monthly Family Book Clubs, they’re excellent for kids of all ages; and a Mama Book Club that we do once a season; and then writing workshops taught by published authors, because we love to learn the art and craft of writing and teach our kids the art and craft of writing from writers themselves; then also through our, this is probably our community’s favorite resource, it’s called Circle with Sarah and member huddles. These happen on the first Friday of each month. They are professional development for your homeschool. Basically, we make one-degree shifts in our homeschools to help us create the homeschooling life we want for our families.

 

(03:09):

Now, I’ll tell you, just recently I got a note from Amy Reasoner. She’s a longtime member of RAR Premium. She said, “This community is seriously the best money we spend on our homeschool. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Thank you so much for that, Amy.

 

(03:29):

Now is a great time to join RAR Premium because we’re launching into our spring lineup. Our Family Book Club novel for spring is The Year of Miss Agnes by Kirkpatrick Hill. Let me tell you, you are going to love this book about a teacher who comes to a one-room schoolhouse in remote Alaska. It’s going to fire all of your juices about learning for this spring. What is not to love about a teacher whose very first task is to throw away all the textbooks and read Robin Hood to her students instead? Oh, yes, it just gets better from there. It’s a great read-aloud for the whole family. It’s short. It’s lively. I think you’re going to love it. Of course, we’ll have a Family Book Club Guide to go alone with that Family Book Club.

 

(04:18):

In March, our Family Book Club selection is It Began With a Page, which I think honestly is pretty nearly perfectly executed as far as picture book biographies go. This one tells the story of Gyo Fujikawa, an American illustrator of Japanese descent. You’ll get a little something in this picture book biography for all ages. Your younger kids will love it and all the illustrations of darling little chubby babies. The back matter is something you don’t want your older kids to miss, lots of historical references and some really good tie-ins there. The author, Kyo Maclear, will come to RAR Premium at the end of March to answer your kids’ questions all about It Began With a Page.

 

(05:06):

Our April Family Book Club selection is this exquisite new picture book I got a sneak peek of. Oh, you’re just going to love it. It’s by one of our favorites, Barb Rosenstock. She’s been here on the podcast. She’s been in RAR Premium lots of different times. This one is illustrated by Mary GrandPré, who is best known for her illustrations of the U.S. Harry Potter books, so you’ve seen her illustrations before. This book is called Mornings with Monet. It is officially my favorite picture book about Monet. We’re going to get a chance to meet Mary GrandPré, the illustrator, and ask her about what it was like to illustrate Monet’s work, which she needed to do for this picture book. We’ve also got some special chalk pastel lessons, where your kids will get to paint their own Monet-inspired work. It’s all going to be in the Family Book Club Guide and at our Illustrator Access Event, where we get to talk to the illustrator herself. That’s going to be really wonderful.

 

(06:10):

Then in May, our Family Book Club selection is Nature’s Friend: The Gwen Frostic Story. Now, this tells the true story of a Michigan-based artist, Gwen Frostic. This one has so many nature study connections. We’re going to get to meet the author, Lindsey McDivitt. Then because this book is just begging for nature study, as is our spring novel, The Year of Miss Agnes, that one also has so many nature study connections, we’ve invited Cindy West to come do a Literary Nature Study Workshop with us with tie-ins to our book clubs. Seriously, you guys, so good. I’m so excited about this. It’s going to be great. I cannot wait. That’s going to be for kids of all ages. Whether you’ve got five-, six-, seven-year-olds or you’ve got teenagers, you’re going to want to join in for that. It’s going to be so good.

 

(07:02):

You’ve heard me say before on this show how much our RAR Premium families love our program called WOW, Writers on Writing. This is because kids love to learn the art and craft of writing from real writers, right? This season, we have Jonathan Rogers coming to teach our 10- to 16-year-olds how to show, don’t tell in their writing. That’s something they’re going to hear about their writing probably forever, “Show, don’t tell.” What does that mean? How do we do it? Well, Jonathan Rogers is going to teach us how.

 

(07:36):

Then poet Irene Latham is coming to teach our seven- to 14-year-olds how to write a nonet poem. So fun. This is a poetic form that will be so much fun. This class is going to be a lot of fun. It might surprise your kids at how poetic they can be. It’s going to turn poetry on its head for your kids, I think, because these nonets are just a lot of fun. Irene has got a whole book of them, and she’s going to teach us a workshop on writing our own.

 

(08:05):

I’ll tell you, we’ve been told more times than we can count that RAR Premium is the best part of homeschooling. We think you’ll agree. To join us for this excellent spring lineup, which will definitely be the best part of your homeschooling spring, you want to go to rarpremium.com. You will find the calendar there, the lineup there. Also, when you join, you get access to every recording and book club we’ve done before. Rarpremium.com to get the good stuff.

 

(08:53):

Dr. John S. Hutton is a pediatrician and director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. His research involves exploring the effect of the home reading environment and screen-based media on early brain development using MRI, and is the first to document relationships with brain structure and function prior to kindergarten. He’s also the founder of Blue Manatee Press and is a pioneer in developing children’s books for pediatric health literacy promotion and early literacy screening. Now, here at Read-Aloud Revival, we’re all big fans of reading aloud, of course, but today I’m especially excited to talk to Dr. Hutton about what happens in our kids’ brains when we read aloud to them. Dr. Hutton, welcome to Read-Aloud Revival.

 

Dr. John Hutton (09:42):

Thank you very much, Sarah. I really appreciate it. It’s an honor to be here.

 

Sarah (09:45):

Well, I first heard about you and your work from Meghan Cox Gurdon’s book The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. Meghan has been a guest here on our show before in episode 130. I just loved talking to her. I really enjoyed her book.

 

(10:05):

In her book, she talked about some research you’ve done on what happens in the brains of children when they hear age-appropriate stories read aloud. Of course, like I mentioned to you before we started recording, we know there’s tons of benefits of reading aloud with our kids. Most of the families that are listening to this show already do it a lot, but I would love to dive in with you on that brain science. Wondering if you can describe a bit of your research for us. Maybe tell us, in layman’s terms if you can, what happens in our children’s brains when we read to them.

 

Dr. John Hutton (10:36):

Yeah. It’s a really important topic. I like to say that a lot of what we’re doing at Cincinnati Children’s, which is really a great place to do this work, is using really fancy high-tech methods to verify the obvious. A lot of the stuff that we’ve done using MRI, big, fancy, expensive machines, is really just to make the case that what every grandparent and so many teachers and parents already know, which is reading to kids as young as possible as often as possible is really good for them, and can really help shape their brains to not only learn to read, but to love reading and to go on and have wonderful imaginations and success in school and life.

 

(11:19):

Really, when I got into the work, I came back to pediatric training after wandering in the literary wilderness for a while, which is a longer story, in about 2013. One of my first mentors, named Dr. Scott Holland, is a pioneer in using MRI to define language development in children. As reading really is essentially a form of language, it’s basically written language, there was a natural synergy there to really use those same tools to look very closely at what’s going on under the hood in young kids when they’re learning to read, and what things can we as pediatricians and teachers and others recommend to help make sure this process goes as smoothly as possible?

 

(12:05):

We started really diving into this research. Our first study came out in 2015, and it was really looking mostly at what aspects in what we call the home literacy environment, which is basically four things, it’s access to books, do you have books, do you go to the library; frequency of reading, which is how often is a caregiver reading with the child; then interest, how interested is the child in being read to, how interested is the parent in reading; and quality, the interactivity around reading. We really wanted to look at all these different aspects of that environment and how they relate to what’s going on in children’s brains when they’re either listening to stories or reading stories.

 

(12:50):

The first study that came out was basically looking at a composite measure of home literacy environment, which is a combination of how many books are at home and how often the family reads together. Then we had a group of kids that came in for MRI and they listened to stories on the scanner. It’s called a story listening task, which is basically hearing a series of stories, and then as they’re listening to them, the MRI scanner picks up really… It essentially measures blood flow in the brain supporting different parts of their brain listening to a story, and that connects with activity in the brain.

 

(13:23):

What the first study showed was kids that were read to more often and had more books at home had stronger activation in the part of their brain during this story task that was involved with imagination and language. It was on the left side in the back. It’s sort of a watershed area that connects visual parts of the brain with language parts of the brain.

 

(13:45):

One of the interesting things about that part of the brain lighting up was during this task there’s no visual stimulus at all. They’re basically listening to the story. The first question we said was, “Well, why are visual areas lighting up when kids are listening?” The answer is they’re imagining. It’s their visual imagery in their brain bringing the story to life, which was very cool and suggested to us that kids that have more practice being read to at home have built up this part of their brain that’s responding more strongly when listening to stories.

 

(14:17):

We published this story and got a whole bunch of attention. It was in the New York Times and Time Magazine, all over the place, because it was really the first to show that not only is reading to children good for them in terms of building skills, but it actually is related to measurable differences in their brain that supports reading and literacy at a pretty young age. These were all preschool-age kids.

 

Sarah (14:37):

Okay, I’m pausing my conversation with Dr. Hutton for a second to make sure that sinks in, because basically what Dr. Hutton just said is that we can see on an MRI scanner based on where blood flows in the brain that kids who are read to more often are better set up for literacy success later on. It actually changes the structure and the way that their brain is making connections.

 

(15:02):

We’re going to get into that some more. He’s going to talk about some more of his studies, especially as related to what happens when kids are listening to stories that have no pictures versus listening to stories that have pictures versus listening to a video story, like a show or an animated story or one of those interactive stories that your kids can “read” or be read to on an iPad. Listen in for more on that.

 

(15:27):

I just wanted to take a moment to put a pin in that because that’s kind of amazing. We all know that reading aloud makes an impact on our kids, but an MRI shows it too. It actually makes a physical difference. That’s amazing to me.

 

Dr. John Hutton (15:40):

What happens when you bring increasing amounts of visual stimulus into the equation during a story, so starting with audio… The type of study we were looking at was a little bit different. It was called a connectivity study. That’s looking less at what parts light up and more at how they talk to each other. We looked at particular networks, the language network, the visual network, the imagination network, and the attention network, and we wanted to see, “Well, how do these different networks sync up during these different story formats?” We got three different books that were all by the same author, a wonderful author named Robert Munsch, who you may have heard of, Canadian.

 

Sarah (16:33):

Yes. Everybody who’s listening, you know his work because you know I Love You Forever, I Like You for Always. We all know that one.

 

Dr. John Hutton (16:41):

There you go. The cool thing about his work is he actually has a website where he’s read all of his stories aloud. In this study, we wanted to control for that, to have all the books read by the same author, the same kind of book, same reader. We wanted to control for that variable so the differences we found were less likely to be related to, “Well, this book is more interesting than that one.”

 

(17:05):

What we found in the different formats was that in the audio format there was integration of the networks, but there was a little more evidence that there was more of a strain going on, that the networks were having to work a little bit harder to connect. It’s a little bit complicated, but the language network was straining more. There was more activity on both sides of the brain, which is something you see with kids that have either lower abilities or the content they’re hearing is a little bit hard for them.

 

(17:33):

Then with the illustrated format, there was a really nice balance where all of a sudden the language network seemed to be more efficient. There was nice connections between language and visual imagination. Really, it was this optimal balance between all these different networks during the story.

 

(17:51):

Then, amazingly, during animation, it was almost like the networks just kind of split apart, and there was anywhere from a 50% to 80% drop in how much they were talking to each other. There was a real focus on the visual network. We interpreted that as during the animated story, the stimulus was so visual and moving all over the place that the brain was really forced to focus on the visual aspect without really as much engagement of the language or the imagination. Imagination was probably less important because the visual was doing a lot of that work.

 

(18:27):

There are two studies we did that found the same thing. One was more focused on the attention networks and one was more on the imagination networks. We summarized the studies as suggesting a Goldilocks effect, where audio seemed a little too cold at this stage and then animation seemed a little too hot and illustrated storybooks were just right. The reason being is that scaffolding question, not that audiobooks are bad at all, but they’re just a little hard at that age. Let’s say a child is listening to an audiobook and it says, “The rhinoceros went to Africa,” and the child has never seen a rhinoceros before or something. Then they think, “What is that?” and they’re wondering. Meanwhile, the story keeps going. There’s just a little more of that. It’s just harder.

 

Sarah (19:18):

Their bank of their knowledge of the world, or their experience with different images, or their library of awareness of different things in the world is more limited until they get older, right?

 

Dr. John Hutton (19:29):

Exactly. That’s exactly right. The pictures just give them that little extra bit. If it’s a picture book and it says rhinoceros and there’s a picture of a rhinoceros, they’re like, “Oh, that’s what a rhinoceros is.” From then on, they’ve got that encoded. That’s probably why kids love picture books at that age. They get little extra cookies here and there to show them what’s going on, but then their imagination takes it the rest of the way, whereas in animation there’s a real tendency for the animation to do so much of the work that it takes the child out of the equation, not totally, but just reduces the amount of work they have to do.

 

(20:02):

Really, our take-home message was we think not that all animation is bad and whatever, but at this age it seems like those classic picture books were probably the best way to get these different brain networks talking to each other and syncing up to support that process.

 

Sarah (20:19):

Yeah, which makes sense also with, I think, when we just watch how our kids naturally respond if we try to introduce, let’s say, reading aloud a novel like Little House on the Prairie or something to a child who is younger than is really ready for it, who maybe doesn’t have quite the visual library in their mind of the images that they might need to call on to be able to imagine that well. We can tell because they get antsy. They’re not really interested.

 

(20:51):

I can see it in my own kids. I’m thinking of my seven-year-old twins, especially, just at the moment. If they’re watching a show, you can almost see in their eyes a glazed-over-ness. I’m sure that’s the scientific term. That doesn’t happen when we’re reading a picture book. I can see it in their eyes. I think I can see a different kind of attention or connectedness or something, so it makes sense to me.

 

(21:18):

Just as a mother, it makes sense to me to say, “Oh, that’s what’s happening in their brains.” When I’m reading to them something that doesn’t have images, it’s harder for them to call up the images themselves. Not impossible, but more work. When I’m reading them something that has illustrations, they’re able to really just take it all in.

 

(21:38):

I think the thing… Let me see. I underlined it in Meghan’s book. “When the children were listening to the story while looking at pictures, their brain networks were helping each other, reinforcing neural connections and strengthening their intellectual architecture, the delicate filaments of a floating sea creature.”

 

(21:54):

Their brain was just making all those firing connections, and I can tell that. I can see it in my kids. I think I just feel validated in being like, “Hey, you know when we notice that thing about our kids, that they’re either getting fidgety or glazing over when they’re staring at a screen for too long? That’s a thing. There’s a real thing happening in their brain.”

 

Dr. John Hutton (22:15):

Actually, what you’re describing truly is an interaction between two attention networks in the brain. There really are two fundamental networks that support attention in the human brain. One is called the dorsal attention network, which is the spotlight. It’s the focus. Then the other is the ventral attention network, which is the redirect.

 

(22:35):

They evolved for us to be able to focus on tasks, but then also have a way to notice if, for example, a bear is coming out of the woods. This other network says, “Hey, wait a minute, shift focus. Look over there. Look over there.” They operate in this dynamic balance where really the ventral network is always saying, “Well, okay, let’s shift.” During a story, for example, looking at pictures, “Okay, let’s listen to language now. Let’s imagine.” It’s constantly redirecting our attention to pay attention to what’s most salient or most meaningful in the story.

 

(23:11):

What we found in one of our studies was that during the illustrated picture book, these two networks were really operating in a very balanced way, where there was evidence that there was more capacity for the ventral network to help reorient attention to different parts of the story, whereas in the animated format there was a huge disengagement of the ventral network and a hyper focus in the dorsal network. There’s some evidence as to why, where it could be that the visual stimulus was so powerful that it made it harder for this other network to redirect to other parts of the story.

 

(23:45):

That’s one of the things you hear about a lot of screen media is it can be overstimulating, exactly what you said, where it’s just hard, what you’re seeing when you try to redirect a child if they’re watching TV and glazed over and you talk to them. You’re like, “Hey, Michael? Michael? Michael?” It just takes a lot to get them pushed off of that and to get their ventral network to redirect. That is actually those two networks operating in real time.

 

(24:26):

There’s a maxim in neuroscience. Neurons that fire together wire together. Really, the more you practice anything, the stronger the neural circuits become through just more wiring or the wiring is insulated more, a process called myelination. Essentially, those pathways get more efficient, faster, stronger.

 

(24:47):

So the amount of reading does matter a lot, but the other part that’s also important is the quality, the interactivity around reading, often called dialogic reading, where not only is the child being read to, which is coming at them, but that the child is invited to participate in the story and that they’re asking questions and they’re talking and they’re exercising their vocabularies.

 

(25:09):

Our first study really showed that more stories more frequent certainly does seem to benefit the imagination areas of the brain. Then a second study where we looked more at the quality, the amount of interactivity in a group of parents with their kids at the same age, these were four-year-olds, we found that those kids that had more interactive reading had increased activity in a different part of their brain on the left, but more involved with talking, more involved with the process of using language and probably eventually with writing. It’s a composite. Reading is such a nuanced thing, where there’s a lot of factors that really are important.

 

Sarah (25:51):

Andrew Pudewa from the Institute for Excellence in Writing will say when it comes to helping our kids be good writers later on, he’ll say, “You can’t get out what you didn’t put in.” He’s talking about how important it is for us to put in really good language because you can’t expect your child to write eloquently or with good grammar and syntax and word choice and diction and all that if they haven’t had that language put into them over the years, so that makes sense to me.

 

(26:31):

I’m interrupting my conversation with Dr. Hutton once more because I just wanted to mention that during my conversation with Dr. Hutton, something that kept standing out to me is how our own instincts as parents are basically proven by his scientific research, his medical research. That really just helped me remember how important it is for us to trust our gut as moms and dads and caregivers of our children.

 

(26:57):

I mentioned when I was talking to Dr. Hutton that if I try to read a really long narrative to my youngest kids, really young kids, especially if they’re two, three, four, or five, before they’re really ready, before they have that bank or that library of images that they can call upon, then they’re not really interested because they don’t have what they need yet to create the visual imagery that goes along with that narrative text. But then if you read to them a picture book, they’re all in, totally engaged. Then if we put our kids in front of us something that’s animated, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but like I mentioned to Dr. Hutton, I can see my kids’ eyes glaze over, almost like they’re checking out on some level. The fact that we notice this about our kids, and then his research really shows that, speaking of the brain, what we can see in an MRI, we know that something is happening different in the brain based on whether or not our kids are fully engaged or not.

 

(28:00):

Anyway, I just thought it was worth pointing out that it’s worth following your gut. When you’re watching your kids, if you’ve got a child who seems kind of disinterested when you’re trying to read a longer text that doesn’t have any illustrations, maybe you’re trying to move into novels a little earlier than would be best for your child and you can stick with picture books for a lot longer, and they’re still going to get so much out of that. In fact, based on his research, it sure sounds like their brains are going to be firing on all cylinders when you pair really good narrative text with illustrations.

 

(28:36):

We say it all the time at Read-Aloud Revival, you can’t stay with picture books too long. There is nothing to gain from moving up to chapter books or novels early because usually the language, the diction, the grammar and syntax of a picture book text is actually more elevated than that in a novel or a chapter book, and so there’s nothing that a novel can give your child that a picture book can’t. This is just one more vote in the column of stick with picture books for longer, and especially if you are wondering… If you’re starting to get concerned that you think, “Man, I wonder if I should be reading longer narrative texts to my kids that’s not illustrated,” I hope that this episode is helping you see that your child’s brain is firing on all cylinders even better when they’re looking at illustrations and listening to you read aloud or listening to an audiobook. Good stuff here.

 

(29:27):

Okay, we’ll go back to the conversation because I asked Dr. Hutton… On the day I interviewed him was the day that his newest study published, that very day, so I asked him to tell us about this newest study that just published.

 

Dr. John Hutton (29:40):

We’ve looked at a lot of different pieces of the puzzle in terms of what’s going on in the home, whether it’s around reading or screen time, that impact brain function, brain structure, the kinds of things that are predictors of brain architecture supporting reading. Recently, we flipped it a little bit and we started to look at, okay, so how can we identify how kids are doing in terms of their reading feel at a pretty age?

 

(30:05):

In pediatrics historically, we haven’t really looked very closely at reading. We care about reading. We talk about reading. We know it’s important, but it’s very often been deferred to when kids go to school. The first five years are the time when the brain is most plastic, it’s most efficient at developing these brain connections. That’s why it’s so much harder to fix a reading problem when kids are older than to prevent it.

 

(30:32):

What we wanted to do is develop a tool that could help get a sense of where kids are as far in advance of when they go to kindergarten as possible. Here, we’re looking at about three years old. So we developed a tool called The Reading House, which is a screening tool of early literacy skills for three- and four-year-olds, but it’s sort of a stealthy way to do it. It’s actually a children’s book. It’s a board book with 14 pages that’s a tour through this house that models all the different skills that go into learning how to read, starting with what words are, what a cover of a book is, letters in the alphabet, letter sounds, vocabulary, and at the end the child writes their name on the back of the book on the surface because it’s their book to take home, but we also want to see if they can write their name, which we know is an important predictor of reading skills.

 

(31:18):

We developed this tool. We’ve done some studies showing that it really is an effective way to screen at that age. One thing we really wanted to do was to incorporate the brain science. Since that has been such an area of strength for us and an area where we’ve gotten a lot of really amazing information over the past few years, we wanted to say, well, okay, so we’re screening kids at three and four years old; we know that kids that have higher scores on this Reading House also have higher skills on a bunch of other cognitive measures. We looked at language, rhyming, rapid naming abilities, which is a phonological skill, so we know that the measure holds up behaviorally. But what does it mean when a child scores higher on this tool in terms of what their brain looks like? Does this have any relationship with the architecture of their brain?

 

(32:04):

For this, we did a different type of MRI that we haven’t done before, which is morphometry, which is a fancy word to say thickness of the surface of the brain, not any more about activation or connections but more about grey matter, that lining of cells on the surface of the brain. It’s really where all the synapses and connections are. We know from research involving older kids and adults that higher reading skills is related to thicker cortex, mostly on the left side of the brain in areas that are involved with language and visual processing. It’s this nice, efficient network. Again, it’s lateralized to the left.

 

(32:45):

We wanted to see if this was true in these younger kids. Our hypothesis was kids with higher scores in The Reading House, we would expect they would have thicker cortex grey matter in that left part of their brain. We got about 70 kids that came in for MRI. They were from all different backgrounds, about half boys, half girls. We had them go through MRI and then we looked at it.

 

(33:08):

In fact, that is what we found. We found that kids that had higher scores on The Reading House measure had thicker cortex in parts of their brain, in their temporal lobes, which are areas supporting language, in their frontal lobes, an area supporting expressive language and speech and writing, and then in the parts of their brain in the back supporting visual processing of letters and words. This is really the first evidence that this architecture of this network structure, the foundation of it is there as young as three and four years old, and has already been starting to be shaped by not only these early experiences at home, but even those early skills at age three and four relate to fundamental differences in what the brain looks like.

 

Sarah (33:51):

We’ve said it on this show so many times, that the best 10 minutes you can spend today is reading aloud to your kids. This episode I think helps remind us that not only are we going to see the relational benefits, not only might we see that our kids maybe calm down if they’re having a rough time, or it’s a time of connectivity or enjoyment or delight or just a slower pace; it’s actually changing the structure of our children’s brains for the better. If you want to do something that makes a tangible difference in your child’s brain today, I would suggest grabbing a book, grabbing a kid, or a few, and spending some time reading aloud together, especially from a picture book.

 

(34:37):

Many thanks to Dr. John Hutton for taking time out of his very busy research schedule. If you want to read a little more about his work, you can find some descriptions of his research in Meghan Cox Gurdon’s book The Enchanted Hour. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. You can also hear Meghan talk about that book and the obstinate act of love that reading aloud is in episode 130 of the Read-Aloud Revival.

 

(35:08):

Now it’s time for Let the Kids Speak. I love this part of the podcast because kids share the books that they’ve been loving lately.

 

Lanay (35:16):

Hi, my name is [Lanay 00:35:26]. I am almost 10 years old. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. My favorite book is Guts by Raina Telgemeier. I like it because Raina learns to face her fears.

 

Bethany (35:39):

Hi, my name is Bethany. I’m seven years old. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. My favorite book is The Princess in Black and the Bathtime Battle. I like it because the stinky monster is so stinky. It’s my favorite because Princess Magnolia has a secret identity to turn into the Princess in Black.

 

Bukusha (36:04):

My name is [Bukusha 00:36:05], and I am nine years old. I’m from Connecticut. I want to recommend a book by Kimberly Bradley, The War I Finally Won. This is a story about Ada clipped during the Second World War. She had a twisted foot, but it did not stop her from being herself. I enjoyed reading this book. Bye.

 

Ellie (36:30):

Hi, my name is Ellie. I am eight years old, and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado. My favorite book is Wonder about Auggie Pullman.

 

Mac (36:42):

Hi, my name is Mac. I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I am six years old. My favorite book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

 

Poppy (36:50):

Hi, my name is Poppy.

 

Speaker 9 (36:54):

How old are you?

 

Poppy (36:54):

I’m five years old.

 

Speaker 9 (36:57):

Where do you live?

 

Poppy (36:59):

In Fort Collins, Colorado.

 

Speaker 9 (37:01):

What is your favorite book that we just read?

 

Poppy (37:05):

Adventures with Waffles.

 

Anna (37:08):

Hi, I’m Anna. I am six years old. I live in Massachusetts. My favorite book is I Broke My Trunk! By Mo Willems. My favorite part is when the pigs screamed at the elephants. Bye.

 

Speaker 9 (37:25):

What’s your name?

 

Linley (37:25):

Linley.

 

Speaker 9 (37:28):

Linley. And how old are you, Linley?

 

Linley (37:29):

Three.

 

Speaker 9 (37:31):

Three. And what’s your favorite book?

 

Linley (37:33):

Goodwin the Goat.

 

Speaker 9 (37:34):

Goodwin the Goat by Don Freeman?

 

Linley (37:37):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Speaker 9 (37:38):

What do you like about the book?

 

Linley (37:40):

I like that silly goat got colorful and washed it off and delivered.

 

Speaker 9 (37:52):

Yes, that silly goat. And where are you from?

 

Linley (37:55):

From Colorado.

 

Speaker 9 (37:56):

In Colorado. Can you say bye?

 

Linley (38:00):

Bye.

 

Speaker 9 (38:00):

Do you want to say hello?

 

Keely (38:10):

Hi, Sarah Mackenzie. My name is Keely, and I live in Colorado. My favorite book is Goodwin the Goat by Don Freeman.

 

Speaker 9 (38:14):

Goodwin the Goat by Don Freeman. And what do you like about the book?

 

Keely (38:20):

That Goodwin got colorful and then he noted the shortcut nearby, that he took a brush and all the colors came off of him because he played with Miss Phipps’s paint colors.

 

Speaker 9 (38:45):

And how old are you, Keely?

 

Keely (38:47):

Four.

 

Speaker 9 (38:48):

Thank you.

 

Sarah (38:50):

Girls, thank you so much for both of you telling me about Goodwin the Goat by Don Freeman. I know Don Freeman’s work because of, of course, Corduroy, but I’ve never, ever seen Goodwin the Goat. I am going to go find it and get it and read it. Thank you for the book recommendation.

 

John (39:11):

Hi, my name is John. I am eight years old. I live in Seattle. My favorite book right now is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle because it’s about teaching kids lessons.

 

Edith (39:26):

Hi, my name is Edith, and I live in Seattle. My favorite book, Matilda. I like it because I like the teacher and how she’s so interesting and how she has that house. I like the little girl, how Matilda, how she can move things with her mind.

 

Speaker 15 (39:52):

And how old are you, Edith?

 

Edith (39:54):

Five.

 

Sarah (39:56):

You like Miss Honey, don’t you, Edith? So do I. Do you know Matilda was probably my own favorite book when I was growing up? I don’t think I was as young as you. I think I was a little older than you when I first read that book. Miss Honey was my favorite part of that story, too, so I bet you and I have similar taste.

 

(40:16):

Thank you, kids, for all of your book recommendations. I love hearing what books you are loving.

 

(40:23):

Don’t forget that our spring lineup is right around the corner. You can see all the good stuff, what we’ve got coming up in Family Book Clubs and WOW: Writers on Writing workshops, and truly the best of what we do here at Read-Aloud Revival. It’s all at rarpremium.com.

 

(40:41):

I’ll be back in two weeks with another episode for you, but in the meantime you know what to do. Go make meaningful connections with your kids through books.