The best thing your can do to help your child love books is to read to her from infancy and throughout childhood. There is something special about the time when everything stops or just pauses for reading, whether it is morning, noon, afternoon, or evening. It helps create a rhythm and ritual to the day. My youngest son has an early start to school, and his father helps him get going by reading 10 or 15 minutes from his current favorite. I might pick it up to read to him at some point during the day, but he ends the day with his father again reading to him. What a nice way to bookend the day!
I wish we had more such times, but we are often on the go. As much as I love reading blogs about moms homeschooling their six children on a farm (my favorite is Ann Voskamp's A Holy Experience) that is not my life and probably not yours. Most of us live in a city or in the suburbs and send our children to public schools. Even if we are stay-at-home moms, our lives are busy and technology is part of them. I spend far too much time in the car ferrying my childen to school, sports, and errands.
Audiobooks have been the next best thing to reading aloud and have made our time in the car more than just moving from one place to another. We had started reading Harry Potter aloud to our oldest years ago, but after having been kept captive through the fourth book, we checked out the following books from the library on CD. If your child has a large difference between the books that he can enjoy and the books he can decode, audiobooks help him keep his language skills progressing. Even if there is no deficit, hearing books aloud in the car is a way to enjoy time together on the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment