Reading to toddlers is one of the best ways for them to hear and grasp the language, especially vocabulary and sentence formation. It helps create a base for them to develop independent reading skills in the future as they grow up. Early literacy skills need to be inculcated in toddlers before they can start reading words by themselves. Reading books for real include knowing the leters or alphabet identification (upper & lower cases), phonemic awareness, developing a vocabulary bank gradually of words, and knowing how to use them. As a stepping stone to reading words, expose infants to texture and picture books.

Reading to your toddler, habitually at least once a day, is a great goal to set for yourself. You can, with your child, pick a fixed reading time that you routinely adhere to every day, it could be before nap time & bedtime, or as a mid-morning activity, during mealtime. This will help your child to relax, learn to sit with a book, make connections, and enjoy reading in a relaxed manner. It is a great way to strengthen your bond with them and understand them beter.

Books are the best way to introduce children to new things, values, and ideas. You can make the child sit in your lap while reading or in a cozy setup, to make them feel as happy, safe and comfortable. Toddlers love choosing a thing of their own to do. A great activity to do with them every day before you start reading to them would be to give your child the choice of picking a book they are drawn to, encourage them to turn the pages, and ask them to spot familiar pictures or objects with you as an activity.

Pictures As Books?

Pictures are wordless reading opportunities. Images alongside the text, bring the pages to life. The illustrations in any text help build a visual roadmap while the child is being read to and is more interested in a reading session. There are lot of areas that get developed over time by inculcating this habit, some of them are listed below:

• Development of language skills
• Identifying Sequence
• Improvised Comprehension
• Inculcate the love for reading
• Enhanced social-emotional learning

Picture books can prove to be an extremely effective language tool for toddlers. Atractive and colorful pictures capture the child’s atention, they are a supportive tool to achieve the goal of a child building associations between pictures and words. This ultimately helps in expanding the child’s vocabulary as they grow up and continue the habit of reading. As parents, this is the best and simplest way of introducing reading to toddlers, and as they start enjoying it, the level of reading can be enhanced.

The beauty of certain wordless picture books is such that it enables the child to think, imagine, unleash their creativity, and understand the story in their own way. It plays its role in attachment & bonding when the child will atempt to express their thoughts using facial expressions, gestures, actions, and their own vocabulary. This will help us understand the child’s thought process beter. Following or seeing a series of pictures and building a story out of it will enable the child to understand the concept of sequencing, what comes next and the idea of causation and effect.

Picture Books to Real World

Pictures speak louder than words, indeed. Picture books focus on a variety of subjects and themes, the common ones teaching us values like kindness, love, and friendship. These different themes help widen the child’s perspectives from a very young age and make them more aware of things around them as well as relationships. This is one of the best mediums to make learning fun and valuable for your child. The impact of reading picture books every day is long-term, with time, you will be able to observe your child drawing connections, associating, replicating, imitating from what they read in their daily lives and to their conversations.

An introduction to art can be done via picture books. The illustrations enhance the story and its associated emotions. Each time the child revisits the picture, they notice new things, exploring and giving way to their imaginations. New actions or skills can also be learned by imitating what the children see their favorite characters doing in the book, for instance, dancing, baking, swimming, etc.

How To Read A Picture? – Child Edition

These are a certain set of questions that you can ask your child in order to involve them while reading:

• What can you see in this picture?
• Could you please describe what you see?
• What do you think of this picture? (Talk about the colors, emotions, objects seen, etc.)
• If there is a person in the picture, engage with your child in identifying who it is, what they are wearing, where they are going, what they are doing or saying.

As parents, make this activity as much fun as possible. Make sure you don’t force your child to talk if they’re not ready to. Give them the space to observe, visualize, process and imagine at their own pace. They will talk when they are ready! We should aim at making the picture talk activity itself an absolute comfort zone for the child, and create the path for them to start enjoying reading, together with bridging the gap between generations.

Picture book Recommendations for your Toddler

• Friends – Writen and illustrated by Helme Heine
• Cars and Trucks And Things That Go by Richard Scarry
• If You Give A Mouse A Cookie by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond
• Freight Train by Donald Crews

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands”
– Neil Gaiman