It is never too early to read to your baby. Research shows that reading aloud to your baby…
- develops a love of literacy
- grows their vocabulary
- stimulates language acquisition
- teaches them to think critically
- contributes to the bond between caregiver and child [1]
I started reading to Enzo when he was about 4 weeks old. I read that nightime routines were key to a good nights rest so I incorporated reading into our routine.
When babies are read to from birth, that access to books greatly improves a child’s changes of becoming a happy, successful human being [3]
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Was the first book I ever read him and is a great book to begin with because it has simple pictures and words. Picture books are a great place to start. In fact, “picture books are 50% more likely than [caregiver]-child interactions to include rare words that aren’t among the 5,000 most common words in the English language” [2]
After a few weeks of Goodnight Moon and Brown Bear, Brown Bear over and over, I was ready for something else. But, babies love repetition. They find comfort in the familiarity and learn word recognition. This article was really helpful in keeping me motivated to read the same few books over and over because I was definitely tired of these few books.
Birth to three years is the most sensitive time for the acquisition of speech and language. [4]
Through my research about reading to babies, I learned that the pauses between pages and the pause after you close the book is one of the most powerful pieces of shared reading. This is known as active engagement using non-immediate talk and is beneficial to language development [5].
After learning this, I tried my best to incorporate more pauses, but at this time, Enzo learned to turn the pages and that is what he focused on the most. We still pause at the end of the book and before turning pages when he lets me.
Research also shows that you should be facing your baby when you read to them so they can see your mouth move. This has been a challenge for us but we are working on it!
Here are Enzo’s favorite bedtime books (through 7 months old)
These are books we read mostly during the day, not part of our bedtime routine.
- The ABCs of Love (I can’t even begin to tell you how much he loves this book. He will stare at the last page for several minutes! Last picture on right in the gallery above with the hears and animals on the page)
- Giraffes Can’t Dance
- Corduroy
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar
- 1, 2, 3, Counting (He loved this as a baby)
- My First 100 Words (he LOVES this one. It is always the one he chooses to look at. The realistic pictures are great!).
- Custom Family Album we made on Pinhole Press for about $40 (highly recommend doing this! If not through pinhole, then DIY!)
The book in the first photo on this blog is one that after reading a few times, I realized should wait until he is a bit older. It is not a board book and is quite long. I mostly purchased it because it matched the decor in his room.
When choosing books for your baby, be sure they are board books. Regular pages are fine until they can grab them… then you have problems eek! I have about two dozen books in Enzo’s closet that we don’t read because they just don’t capture his attention, and that is okay! We can stick to our small rotation now and incorporate the others later.
Share your favorite baby books in the comments below. At what age did you start reading to your little one?
Sources for this blog:
[1] Casaola, M. (2016). Research Sheds Light on How Babies Learn and Develop Language. Available: https://hdtoday.human.cornell.edu/2007/12/05/research-sheds-light-on-how-babies-learn-and-develop-language/
[2] Towell, J. L., Bartram, L., Morrow, S., & Brown, S. L. (2021). Reading to Babies: Exploring the Beginnings of Literacy. Journal of Early Childhoood Literacy. Volume 21, Issue 3.
[3] Butler, D. (1980). Babies Need Books.
[4] National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders (2014) Speech and Language Developmental Milestones. Available at: http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/ speech-and-language
[5] Zevenberger, A. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2003). Dialogic Reading: A Shared Picture Book Reading Intervention for Preschoolers.
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