In our age of the mass media and the Internet children prefer to spend time watching TV or playing computer games. Very few juniors realize that reading a book may be just as exciting and breathtaking as watching a movie of the same story. However, experienced readers know that impressions after reading a good book may be even more breathtaking than after viewing an action movie. Besides, reading is extremely useful for a young mind:
– reading develops imagination and emotional qualities,
– reading is brilliant gymnastics for the brain,
– reading improves memory and enlarges vocabulary,
– reading helps kids learn attention focusing and patience,
– reading stimulates cognitive capacity,
– reading is a source of knowledge about the world.
What can parents do to arouse a child’s interest in reading? It is very important to start instilling a love of reading into children at infancy. This implies not just work on qualities of a small person but mostly work on your own laziness. It is much easier to allow a child to watch colorful cartoons instead of spending hours with the child reading books aloud. However, thoughtful parents may not neglect all of the benefits of raising an intelligent and clever child in spite of all additional efforts needed.
The parents’ way of life is the best example of proper behavior for their children. So the best and easiest way for parents to teach children to love reading is to inspire them by personal example. Kids always imitate the behavior of their parents. If a baby often sees books in mother’s or father’s hands, the baby will want to have the same “toy” too. Books may become the favorite playthings of a child long before he or she learns to read. With the due diligence of the parents there is even a chance that using books as toys will not necessarily lead to their destruction.
The next milestone is to start to read aloud to a child as early as possible. This not only imparts reading skills to a baby, even if a baby cannot understand all the words yet this stimulates the development of auditory perception, curiosity and thinking abilities. If a child hears a new word or a new unclear fact or idea this evokes natural curiosity, incites a kid to ask questions and to get at the roots of things.
There is an obstacle that prevents most children from reading books – television. Many children, as well as adults, can’t imagine life without TV. Of course, there are many useful and informative programs for children on TV and it is not possible to reject television completely. But it is necessary to make it clear to a child that a book contains advanced variants of a film version of a story. The main thing is that, before they watch a film version, children must develop their own vision of a story. So that the book has been imprinted in child’s memory as the original source and the child has developed his own cognitive experience. So beware that you must not allow children to spend too much time being glued to the TV.
Another very important point is a selection of books for little listeners and readers but it is a rich topic which deserves to be reviewed in a separate article. In the beginning the major task is to detect genres and authors that holds a child’s attention most of all.
Reading books is extremely useful on all stages of personal development – from early childhood when children only begin to understand the world by listening to books read by their parents till the mature age when books provide knowledge needed for spiritual growth and adaptation to age crises. Books teach to love, to empathize, to analyze actions and to trace cause-and-effect relations between events. Reading books contributes to the development of a holistic and well-balanced personality. Help your child to grow up to be a reader!
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