Reading together📚

Reading to my son is one of my favorite experiences that we share. Can ya tell by the mess of books we made behind us?! 😂 We cuddle in tight, Lennox is usually drinking his milk or sucking on a pacifier and fully engaged in flipping the pages of every book we read. It’s “our time” and we love to be goofy and animated and laugh together. I really get “into it” when I read to Lennox. The more animated I am, the more he enjoys the book and I grab his attention. He already has some favorites, and they are all listed below. These are books that we read almost every day, of course we rotate from his whole collection, but these are the ones that Lennox picks off his shelf. It’s really amazing for me to watch his interest grow and grow every time we read. Within the last few months he is adamant about getting in his rocking chair, cuddling and grabbing books for us to share together. I remember loving when my parents would read to us as kids, they too are some of my favorite memories. Being the daughter of two educators, reading was a wonderful gift they gave me. I didn’t always love it as a young child, but I am an avid reader now and hope to create that same love for books in my son. I know how important it is for me to read to Lennox, but I wanted to find answers from professionals as to the importance of reading to infants and small children. Here is an excerpt from Bright Horizons that I found to be incredibly informative. I’ve also included the link to the full article here.

“Reading to infants contributes to the development of their growing brains and gives them a good start towards a lifelong love of reading and good literature. When you read to babies, it can also help speech development as they are taking in information and beginning to learn about speech patterns. In addition, synapses connect between your infant’s neurons as you read aloud, positively affecting child development in many areas.
Infants tune in to the rhythm and cadence of our voices, especially the familiar voices of their parents and caregivers. While initially the rhythmic phrase, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?”, for example, may not hold meaning, your baby is taking in the sounds of language and how they fit together. As babies see a picture of a red bird in the book and you name the bird, they begin to make the connection between what you say and the picture of the red bird. The more you read that book, the stronger the connection. The repetitive storyline makes the book fun, engaging, and easier to remember. Reading to babies is not only a way to inspire love of books from infancy, but also an important way to grow a baby’s vocabulary – first his understanding vocabulary and later her speaking vocabulary.”
Here

1. anchor shirt  2. shorts   3. vans   4. stripe t-shirt.   5. jeans.   6. rings