Reading with babies

My whole life I have been an avid reader. Many is the time my mum would think I had gone happily to bed, only to discover me sneakily reading under the covers a couple of hours later!

Being an extremely quick reader too, there is no way I could afford my reading habit if I bought all my books (although thanks to local charity shops I did end up with a large collection of over 2000, which my groaning bookshelves didn’t thank me for) – and so naturally I was a regular visitor to my local library.

Which means when the Wee Man arrived, he became a regular library visitor too!

He had a library card at only a few weeks old, and even though he had no idea what books were at that age, he did like gazing at the pictures. Later, he moved on to attempting to eat the pictures, and later still, his favourite activity became flinging the books from the shelves whilst giggling merrily at the trail of destruction in his wake.

Luckily, our local library were very patient and friendly, and happy to let him continue his antics until it was time for use to leave and I’d put all the books back in their proper places.

‘Now hang on a minute’ you may be thinking. ‘All this flinging about and eating of books isn’t reading!’.

And you’d be right, it isn’t. But what it did do is teach the Wee Man that books are a fun, interesting and enjoyable part of everyday life. It also meant that as soon as he was old enough to be able to sit and concentrate on looking at a book without immediately sticking it in his mouth, he did.

We started off looking at a lot of books from the ‘That’s Not My…’ range, Baby Touch books by Ladybird, and books with puppets in them, like ‘You’re Not So Scary, Sid’, which the Wee Man finds hilarious.

These tactile books are a great introduction to an activity more like actually reading, as they provide a sensory experience too that the baby can engage with. Books like the Baby Touch series also tend to have very little in the way of words, but lots of interesting pictures to look at and talk about with your baby.

Once the Wee Man was a little older, we moved on to pop up books like ‘Elephant Wellyphant‘ and ‘Octopus Socktopus‘ by Nick Sharratt, which have various flaps, tabs and pop up bits to keep older babies interested. Admittedly, the majority of the time the Wee Man was mainly interested in trying to rip the tabs off or decapitate elephants, but this is a part of early ‘reading’ that you just have to live with and accept!

Now the Wee Man is slowly creeping out of toddlerhood and towards preschooler status, he finds great enjoyment in story books. Thanks to relatives, friends, and my vicarious book buying habits (I don’t buy books for myself but I can’t resist the odd one or two a month for the kids!) he now has a collection of around 200. That said, he does tend to stick to phases of favourites, and each week a new two of three books will become his ‘books of the week’ – to be read again, and again, and again. This means that he, and I, generally know them off by heart – but this can be a good thing when we are stuck on a train without one, and we can just recite the story without needing the book! This week, we have mostly been reading ‘Monkey and Me‘, ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt‘ and ‘Are You My Mother?‘.

Thanks to big brother’s enjoyment, Bubby D started her reading experience young too, and she seems to be just as interested. I’m thinking we might need to buy a new bookshelf!