Reading books to babies

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 :

Animal sound book, makes sound when button in the right is pressed

Body parts book

Vegetable book

Animal and number book

Birds book

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...