Grasshopper New Media Presents...

When our firstborn was a toddler and we were still adjusting to the financial impact of parenthood, my husband and I figured that the best way to decide which toddler activities to invest in was to list the various options, the benefits of each and then make an informed choice.

So away we went: swimming, music, dance, gym, books.

Although I was leaning heavily in the direction of expanding our tiny book collection, even I was surprised to discover, using common sense alone, just how much the benefits of reading outweighed all the others.

Reading a wide variety of well-written, engaging children’s books with our child would provide occasions for cozy, family bonding and easy, relatively cheap, entertainment any time any place. It would give us opportunities to laugh together, to learn together, to explore places, animals and situations that would feed her curiosity, prepare her for otherwise scary situations and ignite her imagination. It would provide a quiet, self-paced oasis in a fast-paced world. It would stretch her attention span. It would build patience.

Reading carefully-crafted children’s books would increase our daughter’s vocabulary, her grasp of language and grammar and help her understand the structure of a story – a skill that would make learning to read much simpler, and would help her to understand and make herself understood in the world around her.

A daily, consistent and steady diet of high quality picture books, covering a wide range of attitudes, content, situations and story lines along with many examples of and an open invitation to process, compare and contrast would help our daughter learn to observe, differentiate, predict, infer and deduce. It would help her develop empathy, understanding and tolerance; to gather and synthesize information; to perceive the subtleties in the situations that surround her and to make wise, informed decisions.

We never did finish that list. We headed straight to the library.

[tags]kids, children, parents, parenting, books, reading, literacy, vocabulary, “swimming in literary soup”, podcast, fun, economical[/tags]
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