Exposing Children to Various Reading Materials

Video Transcript

"Hi, I am Debbie and we are here talking about reading to young children and all of the great things that could happen when you read to your kids. What we are going to talk about right now is the importance of exposing them to different kinds of print. There is all kinds of print in this world and you need to talk about it often, show it to your kids, read it with them, talk about what that print is for so that they understand that print has meaning and that print is everywhere and they need to look for it at all times. Ways to do that in not only books, books are a given, but magazines. These are great books for young kids and there is a variety of magazines designed for young kids and lots of good science goes in those magazines as well. Anything that you can get your hands on newspapers, the junk mail – let your child go through, look through the coupons in the junk mail, and find the environmental print that they identify. Environmental print are worlds that you see out in our world all of the time store names, restaurant names, signs, all of those things your child is going to start looking for them and identifying them and that is wonderful. Play games while you are in the car – what do you think that sign says? What letter does it start with? What do you think that it means? Things like catalogs are great, catalogs that come in the mail; you have so much of those that come through the mail. Look through it and find things that your child can identify, talk about here is the price of the product, here is the name of the product and anything like that. phone books, phone books are great have them look through and see if they can identify any words – look for their name, look for any environmental print that looks for familiar to them. The point is that you have got to talk to your child about what print is, why it is important and that it is everywhere and it makes a big difference in our life."