Reading Tips to Practice With Your Child
Rainy or sunny out, reading is an educational activity you can always depend on to entertain your little one while strengthening their language skills! When trying to introduce a second language at home, reading is undoubtedly a reliable and effective activity for reinforcing that second language, engaging in conversation with our little ones, and introducing new vocabulary words that will hopefully stick as they’re introduced in a fun and exciting context!
Specifically, children’s sound books are an amazing way to engage little ones as they enjoy the fun songs and sounds as well as provide high-quality language input that allow parents and their children to hear proper pronunciation and bring a book to life. For families looking to introduce Spanish at home, Binibi’s bilingual books for kids, featuring popular nursery rhymes in the musical books and fun sounds in the sound books, are the perfect tool to add to your little one’s bookshelf– though we’re sure they’ll spend more time in your little one’s hands than on the shelf!
Whatever your reasons for reading with your child may be, any parent who sits down to read with their child can benefit from some of our favorite reading tips that encourage parent-child interaction and a child’s participation in the reading experience.
Here are our 3 favorite reading tips for making reading time engaging, effective and most importantly, fun for parents and their kids:
Discuss and elaborate upon the illustrations: Identify elements or concepts in the book’s images that your child may be familiar with and introduce new ones so that they learn what they are! This could include people, colors, animals, numbers, shapes or simply discussing what is happening in the image. It’s important to take the dialogue beyond the words written in the book in order to increase childrens’ exposure to new words, ideas and concepts that they’ll begin to associate with what they are seeing in the illustrations. If you’re introducing a second language, this is the perfect opportunity to teach your child how to say new words in the target language and continuously practice them.
Read the same book over and over, but make each time different! Reading the same book multiple times certainly has its benefits when it comes to language learning (children also happen to love this as they know what to expect), but it’s also an opportunity to switch up the narrative and read the book with a different spin as you discuss the illustrations! You can focus on different aspects of an image, ask different questions and make up a new story each time for what is happening in the image.
Let your child explore the book however they’d like and follow their lead and interests! Little ones will all interact with books in different ways, which may mean skipping pages, spending lots of time on one page, or maybe not even “reading” at all. Letting them explore a book as they please is a great way to foster their love for reading and promote curiosity. This is also a great way to see what your child is interested in and lean into that topic to start a conversation that can help you introduce more new words.
We hope these reading tips and ideas make your next reading session that much more entertaining and effective!
