♥ April 22nd, 2012 , Tags : Childrens, Makes , Comments Off
When you’re selecting a good children’s book you should look for a number of things. Is the story engaging to the child? Does it use a lot of sight words and repetition? Are the pictures helpful to the child to understand the words? Is it age appropriate for the child? Is it teaching them good values?
Let’s look at each of the qualities and see why they are important.
Is the story engaging to the child?
With young children you need to capture their attention and keep it. Parents know that young children will generally flit from one thing to another after 5 to 10 minutes. If they have something that truly grabs their attention they will stick with it longer. So if the story in the book you’ve selected captures their attention they will sit with you through the whole story and often times want you to read it again and again.
Does the children’s book use a lot of sight words?
Sight words are the simple words that make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text. You may have also heard of them as Doulch words. Many of these words you can’t sound out and need to be learned by sight. Words such as are, and, an, at, the, that, did, do, green, just, must, make and if are all sight words. There are about 220 of them along with about 95 nouns. If the children’s book has many of these words and uses them in repetition it will help your child recognize them faster and read better.
Pictures in a good children’s book help the child understand the words.
If the character is talking about red strawberries there should be red strawberries pictured. It’s teaching them about a sight word “red” and it’s showing them the color and what a strawberry is. By associating the word to the picture they learn the word so the next time they see the word they see the picture in their mind.
Children are big business. If you can create something that children around the world will love you can guarantee that they will pester their parents into getting it for them. Now some people go down the road of creating individual products that kids like and enjoy using, but where the real money is, is in merchandising. To take advantage of this you need a load of normal products but with incredibly popular children’s character emblazoned on the side. As long as this is on something, from pencils to wallpaper, there will be a demand for it because kids love the character and not necessarily the product.
So how do you come up with a great children’s character? Let’s look at some of the most popular ones of all time and see what they offer.
Spider-man
Spider-man is a super hero who was just a normal guy who was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him super spider-like powers. He can climb walls with his office furniture fingertips, sense danger and heal himself. Boys especially love him, along with most other superheroes as they are tough and exciting.
Bart Simpson
Bart is a member of the Simpsons family who have been on our televisions for a long time. He is not particularly who parents would like their kids to see as a role model, but he does normally learn from his mistakes and the show as a whole promotes good family values.
The love of reading has to start with loving the stories you are read when you are very young. So let’s start there! It has been said you can read anything to a baby or very young child and it doesn’t matter what it is, well I say it does matter. I believe even the young can Bewerbung tell the difference between Peter Rabbit and a news article, if you don’t believe me try it for yourself. While we are on the subject of Peter Rabbit by Beatrice Potter, that is a great start to childhood classics, it has adventure, intrigue, and some serious life lessons all rolled up into one great story.
Then there is Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne, he’s not just a bunch of fluff and stuff, he actually is a good example of lasting friendship and imagination. Pooh have been friends with Rabbit, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo for years and years. They have gone on many imaginary adventures together and I believe this can help inspire young minds to use their imaginations as well.
As our little ones grow up of course they will want more grown up stories. There are many really good books for young readers to read or to be read to. I think no childhood should pass without reading The Box Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. This is a great story and a great example for young people and might help young ones discover they can do a lot more to fend for themselves than they thought they could hire the orange county wedding photographers.
