Childrens Books - Reading To Your Child Aloud Is Important

by Kent Johnson

Okay, so your child loves to watch television, play video games, surf on the Internet, and listen to music. And there's nothing wrong with those activities, as long as they're used in moderation. Most parents would also love to see their kids participate in more constructive activities -- like reading children's books -- but the trick is to get your little ones to actually sit down and crack open a book a few times per week.

One way to start is by sitting down and reading aloud to your children. By reading aloud to your kids, you're showing them how to enjoy children's books, the English language, the wonders of a good story, and hopefully, you're instilling a love of reading and learning. Many kids associate books with the drudgeries of school and homework, but you want to show them how a well written children's book can be an exciting adventure, a real pleasure, as their imagination takes them to places they've never been to visit with people and characters they've never met.

And reading aloud to your child usually carries over to their interests in school. If your child goes to school and is instructed to read several pages in a book that doesn’t interest them, they’re going to view the activity as a chore, something to be gotten through in order to achieve a certain grade in that class. If they have no real passion for reading, and no passion for the subject matter, then there will be minimal retention at end of any reading assignment of this type.

Regrettably, few children today seem to read for pleasure. In a recent study, only 7 out of 10 9-year-olds said that they enjoy reading as a pastime, compared with 78% five years ago, while for 11-year-olds, the proportion has declined from 77% to 65%. Children said they preferred watching television to going to the library or reading. But the biggest changes in attitudes were among boys. In Year 6, only 55% of boys said they enjoyed stories compared with 70% in 1998.

So getting your children -- especially males -- to read, and enjoy reading, is a real challenge these days. And again, one way to tackle that challenge is to read to your children aloud.

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) recommends that parents read with their children for at least fifteen minutes daily, all the way through third grade, stating, "Before you read each book, read the title and look at the cover and pictures inside. Ask your child what [he or] she thinks the book may be about. After reading the book, review [his or] her predictions. Was the prediction right? If not, what happened instead?"

Make reading a children's book a game, an interactive adventure that you can both enjoy. After all, this is another way to spend some quality time with your kids, which is what they want anyway.

The goal is to get your child to open a book for fun, on their own, without prodding from you or their teachers in school. I can remember my own excitement and fascination when I discovered the Lord Of The Rings trilogy as young teenager, and how many hours of entertainment and enjoyment I culled from the pages of that classic fantasy series.

Of course there's more than just enjoyment at stake when your chidren read - according to studies, readers have more confidence that they are effective learners, and they tend to do better in school, and life in general.