What is more fun than reading a book? Reading a book and working on building other skills at the same time!
Reading books aloud is a crucial early literacy activity that stimulates the brain of both the reader and the listener. (Yes, you are working your brain too, grown person!) Reading is what libraries across the world promote to help build literacy skills. But what if I told you, you could super charge and cross train your mind to build multiple skills at one time?
Entering stage left: VERBS!
A verb is a word that describes an action. These marvelous words create windows of opportunity to get to connect words with meaning.
Say you are reading out loud with your child and they are enthralled with the story and wondering how Scaredy Squirrel is going to get out of his latest shenanigans. As Scaredy Squirrel leaps, cowers, panics, stumbles, PLAYS DEAD or any other number of things that that involves action (yay verbs!), encourage your child to act alongside the book.
Physical movement can help make sense of words and their meaning outside the actions on the page. Acting out stories can build deeper meaning and connection with the book in children. Adding movement will add value, meaning, and not to mention FUN to your reading sessions.
So cross train your brain, read and move, read and talk about what the words mean and then act them out, read and build your little reader’s comprehension of the words in the context of the greater world beyond the page.
LEAP, I tell you. LEAP.
Basically, if the book inspires movement? Move your body too!
- Julia Cantrell, Youth Librarian, Peggy Helmerich Library