The Impact of Childrens Literature

Many people may not think that reading to a young child can have an impact, but in reality the affects are incredible. I know as a child, my parents were big on reading to me, and by the time I was starting to read it became a lot more natural. The question is though, how soon to you start? In a recent class of mine, a young mom came in and spoke to us about how she started reading to her son at birth. She brought her son into class and he is just 2 years of age and you could already see the impact that it had on him. He absolutely loves books and can sit down for hours and be read to. For those of you who may not know, a two year old rarely can sit and do one thing for longer than about 10 minutes. Not only would he sit and listen, but he was very engaged into the story and loved interacting with the books. Some of his favorite books, were the Eric Carle ones and ones that would pop up and have different textures. Seeing this made me realize how important it is to start reading to children at a young age and how much it can affect them later on especially in school.