Why We Must Read To And With Our Children

At Patchwork Preschool, we are huge advocates of reading. We read stories every day in our classes, and children's books are an integral and key part of our curriculum. But we especially like to encourage reading at home. In the book What To Read and When, author, founder and director of LitLife, Pam Allyn, gives the top-ten reasons why we should read aloud to our children. While all her reasons are wonderful, here are three of our favorites:

There are so, so many reasons to read aloud to your child! The obvious one is that it is really fun and a way to build intimacy with your child. But there are other more subtle reasons why reading to and with your child is as important as giving them nutritious meals each day. Reading aloud will help your child to:

1. Develop Shared Values

The best children's books convey a strong sense of what the author feels about the world and about our responsibility to it, in a way that appears almost invisible. Literature is a moral compass for goodness in the most sweeping sense: it includes looking at human frailties in the face and finding the courage to deal with them. It is much easier to talk with your child about some of these issues in the context of a powerful story, through a character who comes to life on the page. Friendship, kindness, generosity, patience, understanding, and bravery all can be discussed with a smile through the eyes of a frog (Frog and Toad) or through the eyes of a badger (Bedtime for Frances). Through different lenses we learn, we revel, we grow...

2. Build Comprehension

We can "practice" strategic reading when we read aloud together. Great readers ask questions as they read. Great readers make predictions. Great readers visualize scenes and they read. They use what they already know to construct new understandings. By stopping to think together, by managing hard parts of understanding together, you are modeling the joyful work your children learn long after they can read independently...

4. Learn the Power of a Story

All of humanity loves a story. We tell each other our sorrows, our joys through stories. We tell history through stories. The news itself is simply a composition of people's stories. we reach out across time and space and culture to one another through the telling of story. After the hurricane in New Orleans, or the fall of the World Trade Towers in New York City, or the tsunami in Southeast Asia, people across the world came together to help because they heard the individual stories of others. Every compelling story has a few key elements: characters moving through a plot structured by conflict, a turning point, and a resolution. Through books, our children begin to feel the power of many stories, and also begin to reach for the power of telling their own tales. Their stories matter too.

So what are you waiting for? Go get a great children's book, and read it to your child!

Contributed by Rebecca Nielsen - Provo, UT