Matching developing communicative needs
Building up the skills to become confident picture book 'readers' can begin from the first weeks in a baby's life. By the age of three years, some children who have had a wealth of picture book experiences shared with enthusiastic adults are capable of selecting a picture book they know and enjoying it by themselves.
They enjoy 'reading' it aloud, reciting much of the text, if it is simple, or making up their own to fit the pictures, then concluding with a fitting end. Some even imitate their adult reader's comments, such as, 'Where's Maisy? Look, there she is. Sitting in the bus', as they point to Maisy in the bus.
Understanding books
For children to get to this stage of interpreting and enjoying books, there will have been a lot of prior shared communication. Children need to find out not only how a book and a story work, but also how to get meaning from both the oral text and visual content.
Stephen Krashen continually reminds teachers that 'reading is not difficult if you select the right books' - by which he implies right for developmental level and interest. This is relevant if we interpret reading for the child of a few weeks to three years to be decoding of an adult- read text (oral literacy) and illustrations or photographs (visual literacy).
Selecting books
Selecting the right books to fit the developing child is challenging.
Quality books are published, but finding them is difficult. Too often, shelves in chain stores labelled 'Babies' have few books suitable for the first two years.
Little coverage of books is given in professional publications, and even if children's laureate Jacqueline Wilson's recently published Great Books to Read Aloud states, 'It is never too early to start', books for very young children are bunched into the nought-to-five years section, where most of the selection is suitable only for children from three years old.
If we are to support children's innate desire to communicate and find out about the world around them, we need to find books that match their rapidly developing intellectual and communicative needs. Reading books which are way above a child's developmental level does not support learning, which Vygotsky states begins from 'the zone of potential development' and Brunner maintains takes place when adults 'scaffold' from the child's own level of understanding.
Some children may appear happy to 'read a story together' because it gives them an opportunity to have an adult's undivided attention while listening to their soothing voice as colourful pages are turned. But how much do they understand, and how much is learning being stimulated? Arguably, there is no time in life when development is as fast. But are adults tuned into supporting children during each stage of this rapid early development through the selection of books they share with them?
