5 Reasons to Read Chapter Books to 5 Year Olds
If you have not started reading chapter books to your four or five year old let me tell you why you should start!
While reading chapter books your child will be imagining the story
You can discuss what you are both envisioning as you read and this will really help them grow their reading comprehension skills.
Reading chapter books helps your child grow the skill of holding onto stories
This gives you a chance to do recaps of previous chapters to see what your child is remembering and retaining.
Chapter books fully develop characters leading to insightful conversations
These longer books usually give you more opportunities to get to know the characters. This leads to conversations about traits, desires, motives, overcoming challenges, morals and themes.
Chapter books will expand your child’s vocabulary
Picture books can do this really well too but classic literature opens the door to beautiful language. People just don’t speak like they used to! Modern chapter books will also include many opportunities to learn new words.
Chapter books lead to amazing book reviews
Kids love to tell other kids if they recommend the book or not and you will love to have these sweet videos of your children recapping what they read.
I hope I have convinced you to get started on some chapter books with your littles ones! All kids are different but I wouldn’t recommend beginning before the age of 4. You don’t want reading to ever feel like a chore and before your child has the attention to sit and listen to a book without pictures you don’t want to force it. Also, when I first started a chapter book with my four year old I read a few pages each day in the late afternoon. I read picture books at bedtime when she had less stamina for chapter books. This worked really well for us and now at five and a half she loves chapter books and chooses to read them most nights but we worked up to that. If you decide to do afternoon readings I encourage you to call it afternoon tea and pair it with some snacks to make it fun!
Check out my blog post on which chapter books I recommend for littles ones HERE! Also grab my 12 month activity calendar which tells you which book we are reading each month of the year HERE!