Reading is a must and non-negotiable!
All children benefit from being read to by a parent and/or caregiver and these benefits are long-term and essential to your child’s growing mind. I always recommend to all of my clients (no matter the subject) to read to their child for at least 15 minutes a day.
Here in this article, I will detail benefits and reasons why you should read more to your student.
Reading with your child is bonding
Story time with your child is bonding time and a great way to end the day. Story time with your child creates fond memories & opportunities to share mutual laughter over silly scenes, tears over character sorrows, and excitement over suspenseful cliffhangers.
Carving out purposeful time to read with your child demonstrates to them how important they are to you and their significance in your life.
Reading with your child teaches critical thinking
Story time with your student helps build critical thinking skills and can be as easy as asking “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” & “how” questions. Critical thinking is an essential skill for navigating the real-world and forming independent opinions and ideas.
Story time with your child provides you with an opportunity to ask and answer questions about character motivations and foreshadowing story events. Keep in mind, you will model how to be a critical thinker for your student when you read with them.
Critical thinking involves forming an opinion and idea based on information not explicitly provided. Critical thinkers are able to observe and analyze information, draw conclusions, defend their ideas, reflect, solve problems in a systematic way.
Try using any of these critical thinking questions here before, during & after story time with your student.
Reading with your child encourages language development
Story time with your student is an excellent opportunity for new word acquisition and understanding the meaning of words.
A child reading 1 on 1 with a familiar adult will feel more comfortable asking about the meaning of words and less hesitation when asking about unfamiliar concepts as compared to in a crowded classroom and or with an unfamiliar adult.
As you read with your child, you will be modeling voice inflections and what to do when arriving at punctuation like a comma, period, question mark, exclamation mark and colon. Modeling and practicing these skills strengthens your child’s emotional intelligence
Conclusion
Reading with your child generates so many beneficial long-lasting experiences and can take place with just 15 dedicated minutes a day!
This post will be updated with new ideas and tools to use as I learn and research more strategies.