Reading With Kids

I've posted before about the importance of reading to children. This includes babies and young children. But all children benefit form being read too. When babies are young, they benefit from reading the pictures, just talking about the pictures in the book, patting their hand on any sensory pictures so they get the idea of pictures and words having meaning. As they get older, children can sit in your lap or next to you, wherever they are most comfortable, and if you have a hard book, you can let them try to turn the pages, so they learn this important skill of how to hold a book, how the pages turn from left to right, that the words go from left to right and still learning that the words have meaning and connecting pictures to the words.

Reading to children at a young age also turns them in to lifelong readers. Exposing children to books and having them see you reading books and making these happy memories will help make it more likely that they will have a lifelong love for reading.

Reading also increases children expressive and receptive language development. As you are reading to children they are connecting the pictures to the words, especially if you are helping them touch pictures and labeling them at the same time. They may start practicing saying sounds and imitating you as they are hearing you say words while they are listening to you read. So when you are saying "car", after reading a vehicle book many times, you may hear your child start to say "cah" one time. This is what repetition is so important.

Reading is also a great way to bond with your child. You are sitting there with them one on one, showing them pictures in the book, showing them the words on the page and helping them learn about different things. As they get older, you can share more in depth stories with them that have more chapters and more imagination to them, and you are still able to bond with them. Reading to your child before they go to bed can be a great soothing way to end the day with your child.

With that. I have included a video of myself reading Mo Willems "Let's Go for a Drive!" In it, I included some ways to do hand motions with your children, to get them more involved in the story, and to help them stay more attended. You can do this with any story that you read to your child. If you have a story that you feel is too long for your child and they won't attend to it, just read the pictures and perform hand or body motions to it. Any time you get moving with a story, or there is a sensorial aspect to the story, a child is much more likely to pay attention. I hope you enjoy the story!

https://vimeo.com/408190209