Well, yes. From a computational thinking perspective that is exactly how one reads to a child. But from the perspective of somebody looking to:
- Entertain the child and develop your relationship
- Instill a love of reading in the child
- Use reading as part of learning (language, rhythm, colours, shapes, animals, logic, concentration, memory...)
- Use reading to introduce topics and explore concepts that they will encounter in life, but allowing you to control the narrative
the way that you read and the subject matter that you choose makes an incredible difference.
I created this blog to provide information from my perspective as a parent who is very conscious about how even our best loved books can foster harmful stereotypes and prejudices. Each book review contains helpful labels that categorises each book by various concepts such as whether it introduces topics like potty learning, bereavement, divorce, starting school, or reflects positive views on healthy eating, our multicultural society (whether having characters of varying ethnicities or including LGBTIQ families) and whether it demonstrates gender bias.
If you have a child who has a particular disability it can help you locate books with characters that they can easily identify with, such as Julia Donaldson's Freddie and the Fairy (hearing impaired) Rebecca Elliott's Sometimes (physical disabilities) or Oliver Jeffers The Heart and the Bottle (depression) though I do believe that wonderfully inclusive books like these should be read by everybody to help de-stigmatise differences.
When you read to children, no matter how funny the book (because humour is so often linked to stereotype) it is important to point out examples of prejudice and discrimination rather than dismiss it as trivial and to encourage critical thinking in children.
For example my son loves the Large Family books by Jill Murphy and as elephants are my favourite animal I loved them myself as a child. But having Mr Large portrayed as a hapless, bumbling father who cannot take care of his children effectively when Mrs Large is ill, who burns the food because he'd rather watch football is not a fair reflection of modern family life and does not provide a positive male role model. So we talk about how many stay at home fathers we know and we talk about how wonderful his own Daddy is because he shares responsibility for the housework and childcare.
The different development stages that a child goes through means that they can read the same book over and over again and continue to experience it differently. They begin to pick up on the rhythms of speech, they begin to associate words with pictures, they begin to be able to identify them as their vocabulary grows and they begin to speak. Every page in a book is an opportunity to identify colours, shapes, animals, the sounds those animals make, to name the characters, to invent stories about them, to comprehend and remember the story or what happens next, to be able to discuss concepts and later to recognise patterns with letters and begin to read independently.
Reading stories develops a child's worldview in the same way that observing family life, watching films, listening to songs does. Be mindful about what they read and how it influences them!