Happy weekend everyone ❤
What are you all doing today? I started the day with some poundfit workout with my friends from work, quality time with family, reading to my daughter, and now I’m off to some other me time. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I will start migrating some contents from my other blog to this blog. The first post I’d be moving here is about The Magic of Reading with Kids. You can visit the original post above but it’s entirely in Bahasa Indonesia 😉
The Magic of Reading with Kids
Originally posted on June 25, 2023.
Reading has always been my favorite activity since I was young. I started off with reading children books, comics, and moving to teen novels, fantasy and fiction books, and I devour all those books until I reached adulthood. There are so many benefits I got from reading, not just academic or work related benefits, but reading gives me a whole new world. Hundred, thousands of new worlds.
When I have a child, naturally I want to start reading to them as early as possible, build our own home library, so that my child can love books as much as I do and reap the same (or even more) benefits that I do. 4 years ago when I was still pregnant with my daughter, I started hunting for children books. I wanted to start reading aloud as early as possible, right from the moment the kid was born 😀 unfortunately, being a new mom, having a newborn who was not an ‘easy baby’, was pretty overwhelming. I was still adjusting to my new life as a mom and reading books became my lowest priority.
When my daughter turned 2 months, I saw a fellow young mom on my instagram, reading books to her son and calling it a ‘naptime stories’ because they read during the day.
It looked so fun and heartwarming and reminded me of my plan, so we started reading together from one of the books I purchased earlier. My tiny baby was calm and seemed to love being read to, she paid attention to the pictures in the book and listened attentively (I think, because I couldn’t really understand what a baby thinks). And we made this part of our routine — I also asked by husband to read whenever he plays with our daughter. It was not easy for him at first because he wasn’t a big reader to begin with, he always yawned whenever he opened a book, but I was glad he pushed through & keep trying, knowing that reading aloud will have so many benefits ❤
Right now our daughter is almost 4 years, she’s much more active, very talkative, she loves playing, she has screentime now, but reading aloud is still part of our routine that we do everyday. Her book collections keep growing (because I keep buying her books haha) and she can understand longer stories now, and even memorizes some of the texts from her favorite books. Here are some snapshots of the books we read before bedtime.
For me, reading aloud is the easiest thing I can do, it comes naturally, way easier than having to set up other sensory or experimental activities — but sometimes I wondered, “Do I read too much? Should I read less and do more of other activities? Is it the right parenting?”.
More than a year ago, I read The Read Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie, who is also the founder of Read-Aloud Revival Podcast. From this book, I was once again reminded of why it’s so important to read to our kids. This brings my spirit back and gave me the validation I need — that I was doing a good thing.
From this book, I also understand that reading aloud is a parenting tools that parents can utilize to bond with their kids, build happy memories, build the foundation of a child’s love of reading, develop their language & conceptual thinking skills, instill empathy, and so many others.
In her books, Sarah Mackenzie summarizes 3 main benefits from reading:
Read aloud helps to enrich vocabulary & complex language pattern.
I’m sure many people might know this already and this is one of the main reason parents read books to their children. Through reading aloud, we provide opportunity for children to hear a lot of words in structured sentences. The more the kids learn, the more they will remember.
Some people might argue that talking to your child can have the same benefit — but is it really? Normally when we talk, we only use simple & repetitive words and we often speak informally. Sometimes I even don’t know what else to say, especially when my daughter was younger. When we read books, there are so many vocabularies a child can be exposed to and books sentence are structured. Jim Trelease, the father of read aloud, also mentioned in his book that vocabularies is the biggest predictor of a child’s success at pre-school.
Read aloud boost a child’s ability for comprehension
I think one of the biggest crisis in my country is we have some of the lowest reading comprehension rate. Sometimes we read some passages but do not understand what it was talking about. So, reading something isn’t the same as comprehension.
Comprehension doesn’t come overnight, it has to be practiced. Through reading aloud, a child can practice their comprehension. This will be so beneficial in the future, when the child has started school or even later on when they reach adulthood.
Read aloud builds the love for reading
Jim Trelease mentioned that basically, every child will love reading. However, this foundational love need to be build & developed constantly as the child grows older.
Since starting school until graduating university (at least), we would keep facing reading as a responsibility. We need to learned the books assigned at school, we need to read to do assignments, we need to read because we are told by the teachers, to prepare for exam, etc. I think this is what makes people dislike reading, because they perceive it as a responsibility instead of something fun. And let’s face it, would we love reading if the first few books we read are textbooks?
So that is why we shouldn’t simply rely on school to make our children loves to read. We need to start at home, not with the purpose that they learn to read early, but so that they will love books and reading. Reading textbooks will become much easier when they already love books.
These 3 benefits and all the other benefits I feel everyday is what keeps me going. No matter how tired we are, we will always read at least 2 books before bedtime ❤
Here are some of our favorite books from my daughter’s bookshelves:
Is there any parents out here? Do you love reading to your kids too? Let’s talk!! 🙂
Sparkling Letters 