Reading is known to be extremely beneficial to people of all age groups. Children and toddlers can benefit the most from early exposure to books. Some benefits that come from reading include helping your child develop early literacy skills, spark your child’s imagination and stimulate curiosity, encourage your child’s brain development, ability to focus, social skills and communication skills. That’s why it is never too early to start reading to your kids, or kids-to-be!
How to choose the best storybooks for your toddlers
Picking books for your toddlers may be challenging at first, especially for young parents. However, fret not - here are some important factors to look out for:
- Colourful & Large Illustrations: It would be good to look out for books that are brightly coloured and have large pictures. This is so that your kids will be more drawn to these storybooks and that they will be more encouraged to learn about colours and slowly learn to identify them. Large illustrations will also be more captivating for them.
- Easy to read: Do ensure that the books you choose are appropriate for your children content and context-wise. It may be good to choose books that contain easy repetition and have easy word patterns that children can understand easily.
- Interactive: Interactive books can further your kids' development and encourage them to form the habit of reading and learning new things. You can choose from books that have different textures, activities, pop-ups, sounds, or even augmented reality books. Such books are usually more engaging and can help to capture their interest.
5 of the Best Story Books for your toddlers:
Best For Learning about Numbers
Author/Illustrator: Eric Carle
My Very First Book of Numbers is an interactive numbers book, where children can match numbers with the same quantity of beautifully illustrated fruits.
This book is designed to help your young ones learn more about numbers and is suitable for young children who are learning how to count and identify numbers.
Best For Bedtime
Author/Illustrator: Margaret Wise Brown / Clement Hurd
The perfect bedtime story, Goodnight Moon tells the lulling tale of a little bunny procrastinating sleep and saying goodnight to everything he can think of.
In the lovely, soothing words of Margret Brown, children will find themselves drifting off to a deep and pleasant sleep.
Best For Learning about Familial Love
Author/Illustrator: Sam McBratney / Anita Jeram
Guess How Much I Love You presents the story of two hares, Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare and displays the friendship and unconditional love between a father and son.
Best For Learning about Patterns
Author/Illustrator: Bill Martin, Jr / Eric Carle
Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? features many different animals and shows how these animals are curious about each other and the world.
The repetitive text used in the book helps kids learn more about patterns, colors, and animal names.
Best For Colour Recognition
Author/Illustrator: Drew Daywalt / Oliver Jeffers
The Crayons’ Book of Colors is a unique and quirky story which is perfect for teaching your children about colours. It features beautiful illustrations that are wonderful in helping each little crayon tell its own story. Each crayon also draws different objects that your kid can slowly learn to recognise and identify.
Price Comparison Table
To make things easier, we have listed below the prices of each of the books we have recommended:
Tips for reading with your toddlers:
Read together regularly. Reading provides many benefits to children that can help with their development and growth. Increased exposure to books can improve your children’s recognition of words, colours, and can stimulate deeper thought and imagination.
Make reading a fun and interactive experience. Immerse your toddlers in the experience by using different voices, make sound effects, or by using interactive books. They will enjoy the different textures in a book, playing with pop-ups, or delight in books with sounds. You can also choose a more technological route and purchase books with augmented reality! In addition, you can ask your toddlers questions about the characters and certain interesting parts of the book. This will help their understanding and communication skills. You can also look out for more books that involve questions and answers.
Pick books that feature characters/topics that they are interested in. Choose books that are of particular interest to your kids, be it topic or character-wise. This can help to keep kids more interested in the books they read. When they are older, you can even get them to choose books they are interested in.
