Babies Take to Kindle Like Ducks to Water
BABIES TAKE TO KINDLE LIKE DUCKS TO WATER; TEACHING BABY TO READ E-READERS
The world is changing rapidly and nothing more rapidly than technology. We continuously hear of record sales of i-pods, e-readers, kindle, pads and smart phones. People are happily embracing the many new technologies and most homes now have several devices integrated into everyday use.
Many people are using e-readers and kindle to digest their reading material. Since kindle now have free downloadable apps to allow you to use kindle on your desk top, lap top, pad or smart phone you can now access kindle on most platforms, making it VERY ACCESSABLE and versatile. You do not have to invest in a kindle platform to use kindle digital books, nearly any other current platform you have can be used to read kindle e-books, making kindle highly accessible and very affordable to most households.
HOW DOES THAT AFFECT BABIES?
Babies are growing up in homes where most of the reading they see going on is done on e-readers, pads, laptops and smart phones. Babies will be seeing their parents reading mostly from technology platforms and not as frequently from books.
ROLE MODELS TO OUR BABIES
Babies copy their parents and other significant people in their life to learn about the world and how we interact with it. When babies see their parents repeatedly staring at a platform screen, responding to it by laughing or frowning, pressing the odd button and sustaining their interest for long periods, babies want to do the same. Babies interpret this as how we behave and want to behave in the same way. We are role models to our babies. A post explaining this further is; How is ‘Modeling Reading’ Going to Help My Child Learn to Read?.
PIN THIS… Babies Copy their parents. If their parent reads e-readers so do they. Whats your baby reading? ~SuccessfulReading.com
BABIES TAKE TO KINDLE LIKE DUCKS TO WATER
Your baby will want to read your reading device as well. They will be trying to join in when they see parents using their devices, they’ll want a turn. It is a natural step for your baby to participate and explore reading with you on your kindle reading device. It is just as natural as any other activity that occurs regularly in your household, like sitting at the table to eat dinner or sleeping in a bed. Your baby learns my watching and copying you that this is how we do things. So in a household that reads kindle from a portable device a baby will want to do the same. It’ll be harder to stop them from joining in than it is to start them.
MAKING KINDLE BABY FRIENDLY
While baby has seen the process of reading from a portable device, and want to copy that too, looking at the reading material most adults are reading will unlikely hold babies attention long. Most adults are reading text only documents. Copious amounts of text are not of much interest to a baby as it makes no sense to them yet.
Ideally you will need to download some stories for baby from kindle. Sales of baby books on kindle are rapidly increasing as many parents are trying to satisfy their babies’ curiosity in reading e-books.
SELECTING E-BOOKS
Babies are still interpreting the world mostly visually so the most suitable e-books need to provide plenty of pictures for baby to look at. E-books that are formatted to provide a picture on every page will be the most appealing to baby.
Some e-books for babies have pictures on alternate pages or spasmodically placed in-between text. This is hard for baby to maintain interest because there will be times when baby is just looking at text which is possibly as boring as looking at a white wall for us, it means nothing to them and is of no interest. It won’t take long for your baby to be looking for something else to do rather than staring at a screen of text.
The text on each page needs to be fairly short so you can read it fairly quickly and then progress to the next page, keeping it interesting for baby. Long periods of staring at one picture are not interesting to your baby, they’ve seen enough of this picture and are ready for the next. They don’t realize you are reading the text from that page. To them you are just telling a story about the picture which they don’t realize relates in any way to the text on the page and completing reading it before changing the page.
An ideal e-book will have pictures that appeal to your baby. Generally they are simple pictures which tell some of the story so your baby can really connect to the story as you read it.
When selecting a really great e-book for baby you will looking for;
1. a picture on each page
2. a fairly small amount of text on that page
3. pictures that appeal to baby
CAUTIONS WHEN READING YOUR KINDLE TO BABY
I strongly suggest you initiate rules about reading kindle early on. All electronic devices use electricity and babies are known to dribble, sometimes throw up a little food and are usually not very aware of the state of their hands, which may make reading kindle devices dangerous for your baby or dangerous for the device.
My suggestions are to firstly insist you are present every time your baby reads an e-reading device. Perhaps it would be easiest to enforce this by keeping all devices well out of babies reach until you want to share some reading time together.
Secondly check your baby is clean and dry before reading time to reduce the possibilities of baby getting an electric shock or short circuiting your device. If possible use a cover for the body of your device and a screen protector to reduce the impact a baby may have while interacting with your device.
Thirdly I recommend the device is not attached to a power source when reading to baby so in the unlikely event of excessive moisture on your device, in the worst case scenario the result is a shock, not more serious.
PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE
Starting your baby interacting with technology is preparing them for the future. Technology is changing so rapidly and is becoming more and more a vital part of how we interact in the world our children will need to be part of it too as this is the world they are growing up in.
Giving your child the opportunity to start interacting with e-reader technology is allowing them to start developing skills they’ll need as reading becomes increasingly technology based. The more reading skills they have the more likely they will become a successful reader.
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Source:
http://successfulreading.com/babies-take-to-kindle-like-ducks-to-water-teaching-baby-to-read-e-readers/