Putting the 'home' into home reading

With lockdowns and restrictions continuing across the country, it can feel as if we’ve had enough 'family time'. But are we actually spending quality time with our children or just going through the motions of home learning? When we sit to share a book, we’re creating a space to be together, to be available for our child and not distracted by anything else that's going on around us. The agreement to share a book allows us to tune in to what really catches their attention, their emotions, their sense of humour, even what they don't particularly respond to. We can, through the book sharing experience, get to know our children better. Taking only five minutes a day to share a book with your child can go a long way towards facilitating and nurturing your relationship and improving their mental health, as well as your own.

Kids, change, and the power of picture books

 Kids, change, and the power of picture books

Picture Books can be great tools for you to use to help your child understand change and new or frightening events, and also the strong emotions that can go along with them. When children are able to think about the text and make connections between the new information presented in the story and their store of background experiences, it allows them to be active and thoughtful about their own anxiety. Children can use picture books to make connections between familiar knowledge and incoming information in order to make predictions and inferences about characters, their motives and actions, as well as story events in order to learn that change is a natural and normal part of life. 

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