Adventures in Reading
Reading with a toddler (mine is almost 3) can be an exercise in frustration if you aren’t used to constant interruptions and if you have your heart set on reading every single word of the book.
Over the last few months, I have seen that reading with a toddler rarely means you’re going to actually read the words of the book, and you will never read the words of the book without at least one interruption, no matter how short the book.
More often, you will hear questions or statements or whatever, after you turn each page. And sometimes, all that is required is you turning the pages, and your toddler will do the work for you because he’s got some sort of story already cooked up.
But that is a good thing, it just takes the adults some time to get used to it.
You can read about some of the benefits of reading aloud from Sixty Second Parent to see what I mean.
I know my son usually has a specific book or two each night he wants to read. I’ll tell him we can read a book, and he says, “Let’s read Curious George” or “Where’s the spider?” (for the book “The Very Busy Spider” by Eric Carle), or whatever. And he’ll bring me the correct book.
We have probably read “Curious George” and “Ten Apples Up on Top” at least 100 times each, but he still brings them to me.
Sometimes, if we’ve read the same book every night for a week I want to groan, but I try not to do it out loud. A lot of times, I’ll tell him we can read two books, just so I get to read something different. Unfortunately, that can backfire on me, because he’ll pick the most-read and the second-most-read books as his choices.
But reading them over and over again is also a good thing, too.
Here’s an explanation from Sixty Second Parent about how to make the most of the fact that your child will want to read the same books over and over again.
If you want to share any other tips about reading, leave them in the comment section. In the meantime, check out my other posts about reading:
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