Story Time Fun; 5 Reasons to Take Your Child to Story Time

You may be thinking, “I can just read a story at home. It is a lot easier than packing everyone up and hauling them out to a 30 minute story time.”  Well here are five reasons why it is worth the hassle for your child and for you!

5 Reasons to Take Your Child to Story Time

1. Valuable school readiness skills. At story time your child will learn how to pay attention to an adult that is not their parent, take turns, sit for an expected period and how to be (relatively) quiet in a public place.
2. Creativity and imagination. An important reading readiness skill is the ability to create a mental image from what you read while you read it. Through songs with hand motions and stories with movement, your child’s brain begins to make the connections that lead to creating mental pictures about the story.
3. Motivation to read. What better way to motivate your child to want to read than to make reading happen in a carnival like setting! Story time makes reading an exciting event to look forward to! There is a lot of screen competition out there. Reading needs to be taken up a notch to become a preferred activity. One of the key literacy skills is “print motivation” – if kids believe that they will find fun and excitement in stories, they will want to read book.
4. Expanded vocabulary. At 24 months, your child starts to expand his spoken vocabulary. At 15 months, your child can begin to build their sign language vocabulary. In a signing story time, your child gets very targeted vocabulary practice in both spoken and signed language. A study conducted by a professor of psychology at Villanova University in Philadelphia named Blewitt suggests, through research, that a child whose vocabulary lags behind his peers is unlikely to catch up later; a child with a larger vocabulary will remain ahead.
5. Bonding time. Interacting with your child through the act of reading fosters the bond between parent and child. It gives you a chance to put down your phone and engage with your child in a way that fosters communication and learning. Children learn which way to hold a book, turn pages, pronounce new words, proper sentence structure and grammar. Asking questions as you read gives you insight into your child’s perspective on life.

5 Reasons to go Through the Hassle

• You will pick up valuable skills to help support your child’s journey into reading independently.
• You might actually enjoy it! And have an adult conversation while you are there!
• You get some down time while your child is “edu-tained” by someone else.
• You can find some reassurance that your kid isn’t the most poorly behaved out there.
• You will meet other parents in the area and discover you are not playing the game of survival alone