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Make your own holiday story
15 October 07You may have noticed your preschooler has become fascinated with books. This symbolic stage of learning enables your child to display this understanding through art, drawing, print, and storytelling. A scribbling comes to represent an emotion. A letter represents his name. Curvy lines combined with circles and squares may represent a map.
Books are crucial to education, so helping your child to make friends with them and learn to value them is really important. Your job is to show him that books are important – and fun! The best way to do this is by reading to him, which you've probably been doing from an early age. As early as six months, babies enjoy looking at simple board books with pictures and labels. Between the ages of one and two, repetitive and rhyming books are most likely to capture your child's interest, and between two and three, he'll begin to enjoy books with more text and simple story lines.
By preschooler age, your child will love story books with large, detailed illustrations. Lose your inhibitions when you read to your child – growl like the Papa Bear in Goldilocks and squeak like Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh. Kids love drama as much as adults do, so encourage him to join in even if it slows the story's progress as he'll get more out of it if he's participating actively.
Share every picture in detail and encourage your child to find characters and events in them. "Reading" pictures is a necessary start towards reading text, so emphasise interesting-sounding words and play up rhymes and verbal jokes: your child doesn't have to understand every word to find them hilariously funny, hence the success of Dr Seuss.
With the school holidays fast approaching, why not create your own book about your family's holiday traditions! Tell your family's holiday story by engaging your child's silliness, starting with a theme and "real" words and then making up new, nonsense words that are related or rhyming. Write down all of your child's words and rhymes in your silly wordbook. Add art as desired.
- Let your child's imagination – and your questions – guide the content of a book. What are your favourite holiday traditions? What's the silliest holiday tradition you can think of?
- Collate and string together holiday greeting cards from friends and families. Let your child put the pages in order. Use a three-hole punch and string together the pages.
- Consider cutting pictures from the holidays cards or magazines to illustrate your own story.
- If you draw your own pictures, use card stock or cardboard.
- Consider laminating the pages before binding them in your chosen fashion – with ribbon or large plastic rings.