It's Never Too Early to Read to Your Baby

There are Lots of Good Reasons to Read to Your Baby

R eading to your baby is an important way to stimulate their language skills.

There are many suitable strong card books available that can survive the inevitable rough handling from your baby.

Remember that babies learn through all their senses, so it is beneficial to consider this when reading to your baby.

Reading from colourful books with good illustrations has the added advantage that you are stimulating your babies through sight as well as hearing.

There are even baby books that incorporate different textures too, providing a touch experience for your baby.

When your baby is old enough, prop them on your lap or use any position that works for you and your baby as long as your comfortable. Read to them, making sure they have a good view and can somtimes touch the pages if they want to.

You can easily introduce books into other activities you do with your baby. In doing so, your child will see books are a part of normal life, which is a major contributing factor to confident literacy as they get older.

There are even simple baby books plastic books designed for the bath. There are also books that can be connected to a pram, so it wont get lost, and it's always handy.

There is another aspect about starting to reading so early to your child, that is perhaps not so obvious. You might not be confident about your reading, you can use this as a little practice for yourself to improve you fluency.

Remember learning is a marathon, not a race... Reading to your baby gives them more times (years) where they can become comfortable with books.

Whilst reading, point out the parts of the book, such as the pages, and say you are turning over the pages as you do so.

There are also some 'flap' books suitable for babies, which bring the fun of "Peek-a-boo" to books.

Talking to children we find that they tend to be less confident with their literacy skills, we find this generally to be the case with boys. By acting now, you will help your child to be confident with literacy in the future.

Also in talking to parents who had not read with their babies, they told us that they had thought that their babies were too young to get anything from the experience. This is certainly not the case, for your child's sake, why not see for yourself and give it a try ? You won't be disappointed.