3 Ways That Reading Helps Your Child Develop Skills For Learning
When you read to your child, have you ever noticed how it slows things down? Well, in this fast-paced, high-tech, worldly approach to learning, it’s important to actively seek ways to find a learning flow without rushing through the early years of their growth and development.
Children’s picture books are just one form of literacy. They make it possible for kids to learn new thoughts and concepts. Specifically, reading physical books deserves a tad more emphasis. A reclassification, perhaps even, because it can truly be a source of escaping from tablets, devices, and TV media that you’d rather they take a break from.
What's Happening With Their Brains
Their small imaginations may forever blossom through the creativity introduced by vivid colors, thoughtfully-drawn characters, and backgrounds that are so alluring that they jump off the pages. To understand the significance of putting picture books in front of your child is one thing, but let’s go deeper into why you should be compelled to read from this genre more often.
According to lifehack.org, there are 5 reasons why parents should support reading. I’ll paraphrase those here and condense them, but I’ve included a link to the full article if you want to know more about their take on it. Here’s what most hits home for me:
- Cognitive Learning: Reading helps with mental processing.
Mental processing abilities are developed that help a child to be more imaginative and creative. It also helps your child to dream. When he was an infant, my son would sleep peacefully in my arms, and then suddenly burst into laughter without fully waking up. I have no idea what he was envisioning, but it may have had something to do with replaying in his mind what he was seeing from the 3-5 picture books we read to him each day.
- Communications Skills: Better communication skills develop when children read books.
Since little kids are learning new words every day, it may be challenging for them to communicate with words alone because they don’t yet know that many of them. Reading, however, introduces them to words in context, and gives them a chance to interact in real life the way they see it happening in observational interactions between the characters in books.
- Emotional Learning: Reading makes it possible for kids to understand situations.
The more a child reads, the smarter they become because they understand more of what’s going on from one page to the next. When I studied psychology when life seemed to be taking me in a direction that would allow me to pursue the subject on a deeper academic level, I learned that color resonates with a processing center in the brain that alerts creativity. Children’s picture books tend to have lots of colors, and that’s not simply to entertain. Through colors comes stimulation areas of the brain that affect feelings, emotions, memory, and behavior. Pretty neat, right? Check out this article if you want to know more about that.
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