Reading to your Baby

Your baby may not understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but you need not to wait until your child could understand what you were saying before you started speaking to him or her.

Reading aloud to your baby is an important form of stimulation and is a wonderful shared activity you can continue for years to come. It teaches teaches a baby about communication. It introduces concepts such as numbers, letters, colors, and shapes in a fun way. It builds listening, memory, and vocabulary skills. It gives babies information about the world around them.

Believe it or not, by the time babies reach their first birthday they will have learned all the sounds needed to speak their native language. The more stories you read aloud, the more words your child will be exposed to and the better he or she will be able to talk. Hearing words helps to imprint them on a baby’s brain.

Kids whose parents frequently talk/read to them know more words by age 2 than children who have not been read to and kids who are read to during their early years are more likely to learn to read at the right time.

When reading, your child hears you using many different emotions and expressive sounds, which fosters social and emotional development. Reading also invites your baby to look, point, touch, and answer questions. All of which promote social development and thinking skills and your baby improves language skills by imitating sounds, recognizing images, and learning words.

The most important reason to read aloud is that it makes a connection between the things your baby loves the most — your voice and closeness to you — and books. Spending time reading to your baby shows that reading is a skill worth learning.