On April 23, we will be celebrating World Book Day! For us adults, there are many benefits that regular reading can bring about – including mental stimulation, stress reduction, and improved analytical skills! But what about very young children? Should we also be engaging them with books?
The answer is yes!
When we read with our children, not only do we get special bonding time together, we are also helping them develop language and listening skills. The first three years of a child’s life is critical for language development and they should be experiencing language-rich interactions often!
By engaging in language-rich interactions, young children develop:
- Recognition of sounds (and letters when they get older)
- Wider vocabulary size
- Increased listening skills
- Stimulation of imagination
- Stimulation of their memory
Book reading is definitely a wonderful language-rich interaction!
But what if my child is too young to understand?
It’s alright if your child is too young to recognise letters and words. You can introduce pictures on the books and use storybooks as a tool for a language-rich interaction! In fact, at our lab, we provide wordless picture books to parents for storybook reading sessions (as part of our experiment set-up) because wordless picture books allow parents to freely expand on what they would like to convey to their child and use whichever language(s) they like!
Introducing books to your young child (0-3 years) will also provide sensory stimulation to them as they feel the textures of different books. Flipping pages of books is also a good way to stimulate fine motor skills.
For children above 3, storybooks allow children to encounter situations outside of what they usually come across in everyday life (e.g. teasing, bullying), and caregivers reading with them can help them think about how to manage those situations.
Can I use flashcards instead?
There is no concrete evidence that the use of flashcards helps children learn more words than other language activities like book reading. Some children may find flashcards fun and if your child does, it is just an additional tool you have to engage your child in language-rich interaction.
Are you a parent? Perhaps you might be interested in our wordless picture book? Or maybe you’re someone interested in the Science of Learning? Here at BLIP lab, we are researching various factors behind the Science of Learning – including what children are hearing in their environments. Join us in our research!
This post was contributed by lab manager, Fei Ting.