Reading is a never-ending source of benefits
for children as it helps them to develop their language skills, know the
environment and the world around them and provide them with values like
friendship or love. This is the reason why, we should be engaged in creating
the child’s reading habit.
- When is the right moment to start reading to children?
The child says
his first word when he is about ten months old; at the age of two he has a
stock of words of about two hundred words, and at the age of three of about one
thousand words. According to this, experts advise to start reading to
children when they are about two years old, but... why not do it from birth as we
do it with lullabies?
Story telling has many positive effects on
children:
- It encourages affective communication between
the child and his parents, since it establishes a close relationship between
the adult and the child.
- It stimulates the child's imagination: the
younger the child, the greater capacity he has for learning. Before actually
start using the language to communicate with others, the child understands and
produces mental representations of what he hears, thus fostering his
creativity.
- It helps to develop the child’s capacity to
pay attention, since you need to concentrate in order to listen to a story.
- It fosters the development of language skills
and symbolic reasoning.
- How can we introduce reading to children?
At the beginning babies do not pay attention to
the content of the book; they just use it as a toy, as something to put in
their mouth. However, they do start to become familiar with books and develop
their psychomotor system.
Parents are responsible for mediating between the child and the story, recreating and interpreting it. In order to catch their attention it is important to point at objects and describe the pictures in the book.
Parents are responsible for mediating between the child and the story, recreating and interpreting it. In order to catch their attention it is important to point at objects and describe the pictures in the book.
In addition, there must be books at home. But
not only that, the child must see their parents use them and enjoy their
reading. The future reader must grow surrounded by words.
- How should we tell them a story?
- We must take the child’s world and previous
knowledge into account, before telling a story.
- It is not necessary to be an excellent actor
or storyteller for children enjoying a story. We all have the basic resources
for storytelling as it is something we do every day.
- Storytelling is not something to be done only
when going to sleep. Any time is good for reading.
- It is important to encourage their interest
and curiosity, highlighting different details or aspects of the story.
- We should introduce rhymes or songs at the
end, or during the story, since it stimulates the child's phonemic awareness.
- We must use simple and clear language and
point out the drawings to which the text refers.
Hello Marta :)
ResponderEliminarI have read your article and it is very interesting for me. And I like your style of expressing your ideas, because they are told in a good understandable way. I didn´t know about the age and developing of vocabulary and I knew some positive effects of telling stories to children, but not all of what you mentioned. And I think it was a good idea to talk about how should we tell them a story, because we can learn something new from it. For example, I learnt from your article, that we must take into consideration child´s previous knowledge and we should introduce rhymes or songs, because it stimulates the phonemic awareness. So again I learnt something from reading blogs :). Bye, Martina
Congratulations for this amazing post, Marta! I have been reading other posts but I found this so interesting. I agree with you in most of the things you say, I also think that is is possible to start reading children since they are very young, it is true that at the beginning, when they are babies or they are one year old or even two, they see the book like a toy, and maybe they don’t realize what is it. But we can help them by reading it aloud, however I think when they are this age, they don’t pay attention about what you are saying. For this reason, I believe that is better to read them a book when they are relaxed, for example when they go to bed is a really good moment, because you have more possibilities that they listen to you and maybe is a way to create a routine and to the child to get used to listen a story every night. Once they are older, of course we can use storytelling; in my opinion is one of the best ways to tell a story! It catches the child’s attention and they have fun while listening it. Finally, I agree with you when you say that if the children see their parents reading, they are going to have more curiosity and it is going to be so positive for them. That’s why we, as future teachers/parents should do our best to our students/children love reading. :)
ResponderEliminarI can remember one thing Naty told us last year in Literature subject, it was something like this : “If you want that a child read, just put a book on the table and say him, don’t take it! Is a book for older children and inside it there are lots of things that maybe you don’t understand.” This way, almost for sure, the child is going to take the book and have a look on it. A good method to make children reading ;)
See you soon.
Lucía.