Education

Why Reading to Children is Important

What are Reading Skills?

Reading skills are capabilities that concern a person’s potential to read, understand, explain and decode written language and texts. Reading skills drive a person to communicate and obtain meaning from written language.

Reading aims to handle children with the skills to understand the meaning of what they read. Reading with children improves brain development and imagination. Language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing play an important role in kids learning as they help the overall development of a child. Parents and teachers should help their children to improve their reading skills.

Benefits of Reading to Children

  • Cultivating a lifelong love of reading: Reading is the key to lifelong learning. It is the parent’s responsibility to inculcate love for reading in their children. Reading aloud to children is one of the best ways to build reading skills.

  • Improved imagination and creativity: Reading helps children use their imaginations to traverse places, people, times and events beyond their own experiences. Reading can open doors to a variety of new worlds.

  • Enhances listening skills: When parents read aloud a story to their children, they will listen to them curiously. This will help children to develop their listening skills. Kids must acquire this skill before they can read themselves.

  • Cognitive and language development: When you read aloud to your children, it gives them background knowledge on their own world. Reading improves cognitive skills and helps along the process of cognitive development. Reading can also help children develop language skills.

  • Expanded vocabulary: Books contain words that one may not use in their daily life. Reading books to kids will help them to learn new words, and it develops their vocabulary. Parents should explain the meaning of simple words like three-letter words and four letter words initially, then move on to five to six-letter words. The more the parents read books to their children, the more they acquire new words from them.

  • Social and emotional development: Reading to young children teaches them how to cope with difficult situations. Reading moral stories will help them to develop social and emotional feelings. Reading teaches children to interact and grow relationships with others politely.

Tips for Reading to Children

Parents play a vital role in developing reading skills in their children. Here is a list of tips for reading to children:

  • Take your time: Parents should have time to read to their children. They don’t need lots of time to read each day but some short time is enough. They must give their full attention to reading, and children should see that reading is a dedicated activity.

  • Be steady: Reading must be a regular part of the routine. Parents should read regularly and repeatedly; it doesn’t matter whether it is the same book or different. But kids love to hear the same stories frequently to learn through this kind of reading.

  • Make it fun: While reading to children, parents should use different reading expressions. When reading about the characters, events, and places, they must use various voice modules to understand the story better. It also gives a good model of expressive and fluent reading for kids.

  • Don’t stick with books: If you get bored of reading only books, don’t stop with it. Try sharing some stories, or you can also look at some pictures and talk about what you see and ask your kids to be the storyteller. Any replacement of words is beneficial to children.

  • Point out connections: Children love stories, and they also apply them to their own lives. It helps children to cope with distinct circumstances that confront their daily experiences.

Reading helps students build confidence in understanding a complex subject. Reading skills act as a foundation for other skills to improve.

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