Reading Week 1!

You should all have your gorgeous cherry red reading records by now, and be right into the swing of getting those five reads a week. On Monday we'll be counting them up for the first time, so don't forget to read over the weekend! We'll let you know how your child's class got on on the blog next week. 

Please, please, keep reading to your children, too. Here's an amazing bit of research which really highlights the importance of reading stories.  

Two American reading experts ranked 86,000 words in the English language according to the frequency with which they occur in written English. The word "the" ranked first. The word "it" ranked tenth. The word "amplifier" ranked 16,000. So the simplest vocabulary has the lowest number ranking and the most complex vocabulary has the highest. Using this data, the researchers ranked lots of different forms of written and spoken English. They found that the average word used in conversation between university graduates ranked 496. However, the average word used in stories written for children ranked 627! In other words, even highly educated people use much less sophisticated language when speaking than the words used in a typical children's book.