How To Keep Your Baby's Attention With Books?
Your questions answered by Ladybird's Baby Touch author and creator Justine Smith.
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Step 1:
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Build attention span.
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Well, actually it's fine if he only has a very short attention span in the beginning. Gradually that attention span will grow and he'll get better able to focus and concentrate. But the key is to go with it.
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Step 2:
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Games are a good idea.
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If you close the book then you might make a game out of that. You might say oh, I'm going to put the book to bed. Put the book down and come back another time, or you might just play a game with him, a bouncy game, or a hello game, or a goodbye game. If you pick one of the characters in the book. For example there might be a train in one of these books, or a bird like this little bird. You might be able to say, for example, take his hand and wave goodbye and say duck goes quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. The duck goes quack quack, time to say goodbye. Goodbye Lawrence, goodbye mommy, goodbye mommy duck, time to say goodbye.
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Step 3:
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Build upon physical memories.
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If you physically engage him with the book, then he's always going to associate it with fun. One other thing to say is that if you take his hand and put it on - for example - the elephant, and you can say elephant. "Elephant." And you can take his hand and put it on the frog and say frog. "Look, it's a frog." Put his hand on the frog and say frog. "Frog." If you move his hand, if you physically involve him with the book, because babies have such strong physical memories, you're going to help him associate the word with the picture. It's going to help with his vocabulary as well.
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Step 4:
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Let the baby decide.
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So that's really the key message. Let your baby dictate the pace at which he wants to go, let your baby decide how long he wants to read for, and be flexible about what reading really means. And make sure you don't forget that reading is like a game to a baby.
