In the early years, a child’s brain is growing and developing important new connections. Books are a great way to enrich your talk with your little one. Book time can also help develop a healthy love of books, and start your child on the path to valuable pre-reading skills.
You can share books with children of any age!
Books can help you to find things to talk about when your child is not yet speaking much. Infants are learning about the way their languages sound, so book time is a great way to increase the quantity of speech they hear, while having fun together. Board books, cloth books and sensory books can be good at this age.
Your child is learning what different words mean. Books are a great way to increase the number of different words your child hears, by talking about animals, people and places you don’t see day-to-day.
Your child is learning how words go together to make up more complicated meanings. Books are a great way to introduce more complicated speech with your child including action words, descriptive words and questions.
Your child can become more involved in the book-sharing process. You can talk together about what you see on the page, ask questions, and interact. You can also talk about things you can’t see, like the feelings of the characters, or what the characters think will happen next.
Goals. You can share books to enrich the speech your child hears, and give your child valuable pre-reading skills like book-holding, page turning, paying attention, and forming a link between the words they hear and what is on the page.
How does it work? Book-sharing helps develop foundational skills for language. Many scientists now agree that toddlers who hear more speech, and a wider variety of words are faster to recognize the meanings of words, and have larger vocabularies. Some overseas studies have shown that parents who share books with their children use more complicated speech, which provides more opportunities for learning, and a valuable head-start at school.
Key point. You don’t have to ‘teach’ what is inside a book. Rather, use a book as a way of having fun with your child while talking, and paying attention together. This means you don’t have to use the words that are written in the book. You can ask questions, point out different details, and interact with your child, as you make your way through the pages together.
Multilingual insights. You can share a book in any language! For wordless books, the choice of language is up to you – you can use any language or a mix of languages. For books with written words, it’s OK to change the language while you interact with your child. Some parents swap between languages to help their child understand difficult words or to explain something about the action. Some parents swap between languages just for fun. The options are endless!
More about book sharing: Rhyming books
Books that have text made of rhymes are fun—and they introduce your child to how words work. In language, we call the smallest units of sounds in a word phoneme. A sequence of phonemes create words. In rhymes, words can have similar phonemes or sequences of phonemes at the start or the end of words, such as /b/ in ‘book’ and ‘bird’, and /at/ in ‘cat’ and ‘rat’. Rhymes can also be made up of ‘nonsense’ words, i.e. words that have no meaning, such as ‘wozzie’, ‘lozzie’, and ‘tozzie’.
Rhyming can help your child become aware of the different sounds that make up a word. When you read a rhyming book, have your child spot the rhyme with you, or come up with words that rhyme with the ones in the book! As children learn and grow, they become more familiar with how certain words sound the same or different to each other. It may also help children develop reading and spelling skills as they get older.
Check out this video of someone rapping Dr Seuss’ Fox In Sox: https://youtu.be/hqIbEHNqbPs
Read more about book sharing:
Six Tips for reading from language scientists (via The Conversation)
https://theconversation.com/six-things-you-should-do-when-reading-with-your-kids-99637
Make Book Reading a Time for conversation (via Hanen.org)
http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/Make-Book-Reading-a-Time-for-Conversations.aspx
Read the Science:
Noble, C., Sala, G., Peter, M., Lingwood, J., Rowland, C., Gobet, F., & Pine, J. (2019). The impact of shared book reading on children’s language skills: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 28, 100290. FREE ACCESS LINK: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X18305116