SIBLING BRAIN BUILDERS

SIBLINGS help build brains

BROTHERS AND SISTERS IMPACT ONE ANOTHER’S LIVES

BY Reggie Dogan

STUDER COMMUNITY INSTITUTE

There are few influences more meaningful than a brother or sister. In many ways, older siblings play a significant role in the lives of their younger siblings. Like parents, older brothers and sisters act as role models and teachers, helping their younger siblings learn about the world.

This positive influence became the driving force behind Studer Community Institute’s Sibling Brain Builders. SCI believes the sibling relationship is a natural place for younger children to learn, develop and grow.

And Sibling Brain Builders is the perfect place to bring older sisters and brothers together into the cause of helping prepare their younger siblings for kindergarten.

“Most of our programs have been aimed at assisting parents to develop better skills to help their children but did not directly target siblings themselves,” said Shannon Nickinson, SCI director of early learning. “Sibling Brain Builders was designed specifically to encourage sibling bonding and family engagement through reading, sharing and learning.”

Currently, SCI has two projects in selected elementary schools and one middle school for students to be a part of Sibling Brain Builders.

Media specialists and administrators at Lincoln Park, Montclair, O.J. Semmes and C.A. Weis elementary schools encourage students in third to fifth grades to read at home with their younger siblings. SCI provides books, materials, bookmarks and incentives to give to students who participate.

At Bellview Middle School, teacher Dee Wright provides selected middle

Media specialists and administrators encourage pupils in elementary school to read to younger pupils and at home to younger siblings. SCI provides the books and incentives to give to students who participate.

school students with donated books, tips and tools to take home and use with their younger siblings ages 0 to 5.

In both projects, the older siblings will get credit at school for the work they do at home plus incentives to keep it up. The younger children will get more time reading and engaging with someone who loves them and helps them learn.

“It is amazing how much influence siblings have in the lives of each other,” Wright said. “But the interested thing is that the influence goes both ways in that the older sibling in some ways is learning from the younger one.”

While Sibling Brain Builders is an innovative program to foster family engagement, its main goal is to help prepare children for kindergarten.

Escambia County’s 2020 kindergarten readiness rate is 48, which means that more than half of the nearly 3,000 kindergartners are not ready when they arrive at school.

Early education plays a critical role during the important developmental years of a child. Kindergarten readiness, in fact, is one of the 16 key metrics the Studer Community Institute uses to measure economic, educational and social well-being in the Pensacola metro area.

Family engagement traditionally centers around parent interaction with their children. Engaging parents to involve their children through talking and reading is among the easiest ways to increase brain development in babies and enhance literacy in children.

But there is ample research on how siblings affect one another, and new research is showing that siblings may well have a powerful effect on one another’s lives as parents.

It is partly due to what’s called the “sibling spillover effect.” That’s when an older brother or sister can have a positive effect when they help their younger siblings by reading with them, helping them with their homework or giving them advice about school and learning.

In a Time magazine article that preceded his book, “The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us,” Jeffrey Kluger wrote, “From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride. They teach us how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys.”

To be sure, sibling relationships provide children with their first peer interactions and the first opportunity to handle different aspects of long-term and intimate relationships.

Older brothers and sisters also can be crucial in the early childhood brain of siblings. Findings suggest that siblings can be a productive resource for teachers looking to build stronger relationships between school- and home-based literacy practices.

By taking advantage of family connections already in place, programs like Sibling Brain Builders promote literacy interactions between siblings in innovative ways that are educational and maintain an element of choice that generate new links between home and school.