Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/reading-to-babies/5024889/
As an early childhood educator for all of my adult career, I have always been an advocate of reading to children, and in particular, reading to babies. In the past, I led a team that promoted excellent children’s literature through a program called Growing Readers. Each quarter of the year, we chose books of excellence and notables from new children’s literature selections and published a leaflet with descriptions of each of these selections for parents. Promoting reading to babies was a major goal of this program.
Up until I became a grandmother, reading to babies was a theoretical focus. I certainly read to my daughter as a baby, but I had never been a teacher of infants. Reading to babies sounds like something we early childhood educators should believe in, but how does it play out in reality? I found as a new grandmother that it was not as easy as it sounded. The first couple of times that I tried to read to my grandson, he cried. This was, of course, not my intended outcome, but I persevered and discovered that there may actually be some steps to coming to love books. Knowing that we seldom make generalizations from a ...