What Kind of Books to Read to Your Child

Video Transcript

" Hi, I am Debbie with ExpertVillage.com and we are talking about reading with your child, the advantages, and the importance of doing that everyday. Right now, we are going to talk about some of the best books for young children and why they are important. Picking books that have a lot of rhyme and a lot of repetition are really important, young kids need to hear the rhyme and rhythm in our language. The rhyme and rhythm in our language is really important on predicting reading success, being able to hear the rhyme and rhythm is called phonemic and phonological awareness. It is something that is so important that your child needs to enter school with to enable them to be successful readers. Some great books on the market, tons of fun little books – Silly Sally, Audrey Wood happens to be one of my favorite authors and she has a lot of great rhyming books. Cute little books When the Cows Come Home, Mary had a Little Jam, and other rhymes. Five Little Sharks Swimming in the Sea and you could go forever with these kinds of books. Your kids are going to love them, they are predictable, they have patterns, they have rhyming and rhythm in them, and that is something that your kids are going to need to hear daily. Other kinds of books that are great are the fairy tales and the classics. It is real important that you expose your children to as many fairy tales and classics as possible; there are many that have been retold by new authors. James Marshall happens to be one of my favorites, his illustrations are great and he has got all of the basic fairy tales – The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tales are the classics and your kids need to be exposed to them, they love being able to read them with you, they love being able to make the funny voices. Do that with them and give them parts in the fairytale to tell and you can even act them that out – they love it. Sleeping Beauty, some of the books are a little more involved, that is great because you need to expose them to as many kinds of different levels fairy tales as you can. Another great kind of book is the predictable book, the predictable books are really important with your kids. Predictable in that it repeats itself, there is a pattern to what the language is in the book. Bill Martin Jr. is one of my favorite predictable book writers, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see? Polar Bear, Polar Bear What do you hear? Chicka-Chicka Boom, Boom, Chicka-Chicka One, Two, Three. These are books that your kids are going to absolutely love, he plays with the language, there is prediction to it, they feel confidence in it and they start reading them immediately. And they will ask for them over and over and over, and you need to read them over and over and over. These types of books that I just mentioned are really, really important and that when you are going to the library or a bookstore your child may really be interested in dinosaurs, they may be interested in cats and they may be interested in a wide assortment of things. Let them pick some of those books also, those are important because they cultivate that vocabulary, the concept development and all kinds of thing. They may not be able to read them and they are not predictable but they will look at the pictures and you can talk about them and cultivate a lot of vocabulary. "