Which Is Best for My Young Child: Audiobooks or Print Books?
Audiobooks and print books both provide wonderful benefits for your child.
From birth, children start developing their early literacy skills through everyday interactions with parents, caregivers, siblings, and grandparents. It is through simple, loving activities like telling a story, sharing a book, and singing songs together that young children begin developing language.
The goals of reading and looking at books with your baby and young children are to instill in them at a young age a love of books and interest in learning while introducing them to more and more words. Looking at picture books together, reading aloud to your child, or listening to a story read by someone else all support these goals.
You Can Foster Early Literacy Skills:
Make print books easily available to your child.
Create a daily routine where you read to your child or listen together to a recorded story.
Introduce your child to books that feature diverse characters.
Let your child sample audiobooks and help pick the story.
Pair an audio story with the actual print book to enrich your child’s reading with a multi-sensory experience.
Benefits of Audiobooks for All Students (an excerpt from a Reading Rockets article by Denise Johnson). Audiobooks can be used to:
Introduce students to books above their reading level
Model good interpretive reading
Teach critical listening
Highlight the humor in books
Introduce new genres that students might not otherwise consider
Introduce new vocabulary or difficult proper names or locales
Sidestep unfamiliar dialects or accents, Old English, and old-fashioned literary styles
Provide a read-aloud model
Provide a bridge to important topics of discussion for parents and children who can listen together while commuting to sporting events, music lessons, or on vacations
Recapture "the essence and the delights of hearing stories beautifully told by extraordinarily talented storytellers" (Baskin & Harris, 1995, p. 376)
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