The importance of reading to our kids
Are you racing to get to the end, or are you present for bedtime stories?
I was delighted to receive a thank you card from year one students after my mindfulness class. Inside the card, each child shared what they enjoyed most. Every comment is special, but one comment stood out… Freddie said, ‘I liked the book’. I loved his comment because when I arrived at the classroom, he told me - in no uncertain terms - ‘books are boring’. Ouch.
Sitting still and listening is a big ask for little people. Kids are a TOUGH crowd. If you don’t engage them constantly, you lose their attention quickly.
Reading is my passion, and as an author, I do want to pass on my love of reading to children. If we want to improve literacy in this country - and we MUST because currently, NZ kids are falling far behind - we need to role model the pleasure of reading stories to help engage their imagination. So, yes to phonics in schools (goodness knows why we ever moved away from that!), but as parents, we have some responsibility to ask ourselves, how are we role modelling a love for reading? Are we creating ‘quiet time’ to read as a family? Do we read to our kids? When we do so, are we enjoying it, or can you hear the 'dread in your monotone? I spoke a little on this in my social media clip, which you can see below. Yep, I was guilty of rushing, monotone reading. Just hurrying my kids through the bedtime routine, and yes, I wanted a break (hint: I wanted to race to bed to read my books. LOL). But reading a story is a few minutes out of 24 hours a day. I felt I owed my kids that.
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I’m happy to say that I no longer read like that. So, if you’re looking to up your bedtime story game, imagine you are a professional speaker when you read to children. Don’t race through the stories. Be present with your kids during this time. Put your energy into the story. Would you like to listen to someone droning on in a monotone? Of course not. But if they speak with passion and enthusiasm, we enjoy listening to people talk.
👉 Gesticulate and use sound effects
👉 Act out the story where possible
👉 Vary the tone of your voice
👉 Add dramatic pauses
👉 Be quiet and LOUD
👉 Get the children’s thoughts on the plot
👉 Make sure the story has plenty of cliffhanger moments
👉 Be present with the book. Don’t rush it
👉 Audiobooks have their place. It brings a story to life and fosters listening skills
Many studies state that one of the best things we can do for a child’s early education is read to them to foster their literacy and language skills. (Here’s an interesting one that talks about ‘the million-word gap’, in which the difference between reading to kids at home and not is more than a million words by kindergarten!) That is a pretty powerful impact that we can make by reading our children a few stories.
Ultimately, I wrote my book to encourage emotional literacy, but I’m grateful to (in some small way) encourage reading literacy too.
And yay for little Freddie realising that not ALL books are boring. 😉