Book time with your child

Is it OK to read books to a baby? When is it time to start reading with your child? How should we do it depending on the age? 

To the question, is it useful to start reading books with our bilingual babies? 

The answer is yes! And I have found an interesting article in an online magazine that tells us why and what are the different ways to introduce our children and babies to books depending on their age.

As I am interested in speaking in English to my son even though I am not a native speaker, this early approach to reading and enjoying books seems to me even more interesting:

• I will talk more to him, sometimes reading and sometimes just talking about pictures or explaining something.
• And hopefully, he will listen to me with care and interest as we will enjoy the books and spending some time with me. He will be exposed to new words, sentences and nice stories.

To the next question, when can I start reading in English to my baby? and how should I read to my baby depending on the age?

If book time is a beautiful moment that we share together, that we enjoy and that strengthens our relationship, it can be done since our babies are very small. In this article they say that we can start since birth, just cuddling our baby, holding a book, talking about the book and maybe using more than one book each time. As they get older we can say the words and explain those things that our babies are pointing or looking, help them turn the pages, act out what the characters do and say, ask simple questions. When they get older they will be able to find and point different things, predict what might happen next and say what is happening in each picture, 

Finally, how can I make the most of the reading time?

Somethings that we can do to develop our children reading skills (starting from birth!) are written in this article as the 5 Rs of EarlyEducation:

Read: and have fun doing it.

Rhyme: sing and play as much as possible.

Routines: children need to know what to expect in their daily lives.

Rewards: praise their good behaviors, we all love that.

And Relationships: encourage good relationships with the family and other people.

To get the whole magazine and the article about reading with your baby or child:

En español (Regreso a la escuela 2015)

In English (back to school 2015)

I haven't sat my baby on my lap to read him a book yet, and I am excited to start doing it from now on. When did you start reading with your own children? Before reading this article I didn't pay too much attention to the book time with a young baby, has this happened to you as well? It is great how we learn new things that can help our children to thrive better!