Reading stories from children's books and telling tales are of great importance for children's imagination and creativity skills, as well as ensuring their mental, emotional and social development.
The child wants to explore and know. For this reason, he constantly observes his environment and asks questions about every event, object and being. We observe the question of "why" more clearly, especially in children over the age of two; the child's demands for experience and observation towards the outside world increase during the period of curiosity and discovery. If the child's demands are met in a healthy way, it will enable the child to socialize and increase his/her linguistic and intellectual power with a healthier development period. This will have fulfilled an important function in helping the child feel and express himself as an individual.
The Child Who Meets the Book
The Child A child who comes together with a book at an early age should of course not be expected to make interpretive inferences and focus on the book like an adult. During this period, the child will make physical contact with the book and perform all kinds of actions, including holding it, biting it, tearing it, For this reason, the books to be given to the child should be books that are appropriate to the child's age, visually rich, have eye-catching pictures, appeal to the child's sense of touch, and are prepared in a way that the child can establish both a visual and physical connection. The books in question should have more visuals than stories, and the child should be able to sense the presence of colors and objects. Children's books should be in the image of animals and objects, sometimes made of fabric, sometimes made of wood, and sometimes made of hard cardboard, which makes the book three-dimensional. Books can increase the child's imagination and will also prepare the process where the child's vocabulary begins to increase. Books prepared for children between the ages of 1-2 contain visuals, not words, and they are in a narrative order; It enables the child to start reading books together with his/her parents or an adult.
The Reading Process and Its Effects on the Child
The book develops the child's imagination, creativity and problem-solving skills. Children first experience understanding other people's lives, their behavior and feelings in the face of events, and problem-solving skills through books. Many desired behaviors can be taught to the child by explaining them to the child through characters in books.
Reading a book to a child requires understanding, definition and evaluation in the process of linguisticization. What goes beyond this is overcoming the problem, that is,
the child has come to a conclusion about the problem and internalized what he has experienced in the textual context. The resulting process is the child creating his/her own text. The most important stage here is to allow the child to come up with his own text (even if it is incomplete, wrong, erroneous) rather than for the adult to impose his own thoughts and say his own text in the child's creation of his own text. This will improve the child's self-confidence, increase and improve both his vocabulary and expression ability. In this context, it is very effective for parents and children to read books together. From family members such as mother, father, grandfather, sister, brother, aunt; Reading books with people outside the family, such as teachers and narrators, is one of the child's favorite moments. Among these, the thing that gives the child the most pleasure is when his favorite family members read books to him. The child especially enjoys being read to before going to bed. Lying on the bed together, having the child rest his head on your chest, leaning on your body, is the most important message the child gives to the adult. What the child really expects there is not just the reading of books. By leaning on the adult, the child begins to consider him/her as his/her own. The message he gives to the adult is, "You belong only to me during this reading process." By leaning on it, he took the sound of his heart and his physical warmth into himself, and when he started reading, he began to consider its voice as his own. Often, adults may encounter a situation like this: The child has brought a book to be read that has perhaps been read a hundred times. Sometimes adults get bored during the reading process and try to speed up the reading. He tries to make omissions in the text for the sake of clarity. That's when the child said, "No, it wasn't like that!" he reacts. In this case, the adult says, "If you know, why are you teaching me?" he reacts. The real truth here is the situation we tried to explain above. The child wants the adult to belong to him, to hear his warmth, to feel his heartbeat, to talk to him and for his voice to belong to him. These are perhaps the rare moments when the child establishes a one-on-one relationship with the adult. Some adults buy toys that tell stories just to develop a reading culture. It's worse than this: "Stay away from me." message cannot be given. The problem is not and should not be reading culture. Because such a reading culture is mechanical, soulless and meaningless. The important thing is that the child touches life and people, and this can only be achieved by experiencing these emotions without accounting. When the child feels loved, warm and accepted, he/she will be free from his/her anxiety and fall into a comfortable sleep. Watching that child's face at that moment will perhaps be the most beautiful moment to describe. It would be beneficial for adults to internalize this in a healthy way.
The important thing here is that choosing books according to your child's age level is very important. The most important point that families should pay attention to when choosing a book is to choose a book that suits the children's interests and curiosity, and it should be chosen together with the child. For this purpose, it should not be forgotten that it is a very important requirement for every child to have his/her own library containing his/her own books.
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