Babies
and books!!! When a child starts going to school, his study starts and this
continues till he is 23-25 years of age, so why put the burden of books before
that... let the baby play... this is what many people said to me. But i had a
different opinion! Let books be another toy for my baby to play with...
Mom
sings lullabies to infants to put them to sleep right from the time when the
infant doesn't understand what music is! But every baby enjoys its soothing
effect. Something like that, a baby may not understand what are books for? But
slowly and gradually she finds interest in the bright and colourful
pictures in it.
Somewhere
i read that right time to introduce a baby to books is 6-12 months. Best way is
to make your baby sit in your lap and show the big bright pictures to her with
your fingers pointing towards it. Making your voice tone up and down will raise
her curiosity.
Baby
learns to communicate
Baby tries to remember many things hence increase memory
Baby tries to know the world around them
learn
new words hence increases vocabulary
pics of my daughter's 1st books :
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| Animal sound book, makes sound when button in the right is pressed |
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| Body parts book |
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| Vegetable book |
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| Animal and number book |
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| Birds book |
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| Number and baby animal book |
When
a baby listens to words, it builds a network of words in a baby's brain. My
parents used to say, the more you talk to your baby, the more quickly she would learn words and start talking. I brought 1 st book for my daughter Raima when she
was 8 months old. At that time she didn’t know what i brought for her, the
thing she used to love most was my closeness, when i used to take her in my
lap and opened a book to show cat and dog’s pictures with different noise, she
used to burst out her smile. My husband and i try to make sure that we built a strong communication with
our daughter. I also downloaded lots of early educational songs and videos,
nursery rhymes from you tube, and when i am doing my household jobs, i let my
toddler watch them for some time. It gives immense pleasure when she watches a
bird rhyme and starts searching the same crow and peacock she saw in her book,
and calls me out in her baby voice “ M’ma, cock-cock, kuku-kuku “....she searches for toma...(tomato) and Bana Ti (Banana tree)..... Now she is 19 months old,
and relates everything she sees in the world around with her books.
Raima started to understand
pictures and developed preferences for certain pictures, pages and even rhymes.
For instance, she loves cats. Every time she turnes pages of her animal book, she
finds for “mii-uum” (that is meow which she pronounces Mii-um). When she
listens to the rhyme 'clap your hands', she too starts clapping her hands, stamps her feet
and turns around. The other day she was playing with her doll and was chanting “
Jonnyeeeee..... ha ha ha....” My husband and i smiled at each other and said her brain
was recollecting rhyme “ Jonny Jonny yes papa”
If you want your baby to be an avid reader when she grows up, ensure that at an early stage itself you have books appropriate to her age all
over your house. When your baby is old enough to crawl or run to a basket
of toys and pick one out, make sure some books are kept with his toys. After
all, there is a saying, habits are made in the childhood...