The importance of reading to your child…

Sharing books with your children is one of the most important activities you can do with them, to develop their language skills but also their cognitive skills, attention skills and even empathy skills. The process of sharing a book with your child isn’t just about the language that you are sharing while looking at the pictures together and reading the words. It’s also about the shared attention that is being developed through sitting with your child and attending to something together. It’s also about listening to how the characters in the story interact, how they respond to one another, how they react emotionally and how they resolve problems. Not just reading the words but also talking about the content of the book and the things that happened in the book is an incredibly powerful opportunity to develop a range of different skills for your child. As parents, it’s important not to forget that you are the most important people in your child’s life and any activity you share with your child is going to have a big impact. Enjoy those beautiful moments together of marvelling in the pictures of a story book, the twists and turns of a plot and the characters of a story. Going to the local library with your children is a great opportunity to involve them in the process of selecting books that are of interest to them and also to develop their excitement about books as well. Setting aside time each day to read, perhaps at the same time each day (I know in our household this makes fitting in bookshare a lot easier!) will benefit your children in many more ways than one.