Reading Aloud

Spending time reading aloud promotes healthy brain growth. Children that are read to more often have better listening skills and know more words.

Reading aloud to your child has many benefits, which include the following:
• Reading a favorite book aloud is a good way for children to hear words again and practice them.
• Reading aloud is a good way to include the whole family. Invite family visitors to select favorite books to read aloud to your child. After reading, talk about the story together.
• Readers summarize to explain what a book is about. Summarizing is retelling the most important parts of a story or information in a book. You can invite your child to summarize or explain the important parts of a book by drawing a picture that shows who is in the story and where the story happened and explaining it to you.
• Readers also summarize to think about what they want to remember. Summarizing helps them learn new information from the books they read.  Keeping track of what they learn from books helps your child connect reading to learning. After you read aloud you can invite your child to show what they learned by drawing pictures and labeling with words.