How many books and stories are you sharing with your child? Whether this is something you do everyday (!!) or only a few times a week (!) this is a powerful activity for fun, learning, kindergarten readiness, and more. With Halloween coming soon, bookstores, libraries, second hand stores and garage sales have these books on display. You may even have some at home that will almost seem new again. Reading stories about something that kids are seeing and hearing is quite a treat because kids are involved in the same experience.
It would be quite a trick wouldn’t it, if you could download a library of books directly into your child’s brain? The good news is that parents and caregivers can. A few books a day, over several days, can add up to about 25 books a week. In just a month that’s about 100 and in a year over 1,000. That could be about 5,000 by the time your child starts kindergarten, and that’s a library. That magic happens in just a few minutes a day and helps kids learn new words, language patterns and structures, careful listening, and other critical thinking skills. Imaginations and memories are stimulated and stretched.
Many kids will love the same stories over and over, so it could seem like 1 or 2 books read hundreds of times! Here is a new story this year just in time for Halloween, Click, Clack, Boo: A Tricky Treat by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. We’re on the waiting list for this one at the library, and I can hardly wait. In Chicago, there’s a world premiere theater performance of A Tricky Treat in late October. If that’s where you live, this sounds like quite a treat.
In the meantime, sharing books with kids is like brain candy. What Halloween stories does your child like?