Even Santa Takes Time to Read to Kids
Learning to read is a powerful skill we all want for kids. Would you like to give them the gift of making learning to read much easier? Not an expensive gift in terms of money, but there will be a cost of your time and effort. But even Santa knows it’s quite a gift.
To make the challenge of learning to read easier, it’s tremendously helpful if kids have a good grasp of language. When we sing to kids, read stories, have conversations with them and others, and say nursery rhymes we are downloading language into the brain. The brain creates language circuits and builds a bank of vocabulary.
Each time we open a book and say the words on the page, we are showing kids a little bit of how to read. Eyes have to look at something. Kids eventually figure out we are looking at the funny squiggles and these strange marks are meaningful. Just like getting all the connections in the brain for talking takes a long time, so does getting the connections for reading. But we can help brains do this by reading lots of books to kids.
How much time does reading a story take? Only minutes. With wee little ones, at first we may only get a few seconds for one page before they wiggle away, but all these seconds and minutes add up. In a week, could you read 25 books to your child? Quite possibly, because that’s only 3 or 4 a day. Well, in a month that makes about 100 books! Now, in a year that’s over 1,000!
You have just fed your child’s brain a library of books and wow, does that make learning to read a whole lot easier. And it wasn’t hard.
There are some wonderful Christmas books. Besides the favorites and traditional ones, each year adds a few more special choices. Two books on my Christmas list are Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Christmas 123 and How to Catch Santa by Jean Reagan. Kids can count and look for the caterpillar on every page. Kids all over the world try and stay awake just to see Santa.
What stories do you think Santa likes to read?