I beg you all to read superb books aloud to your children! Begin on the day they are born. I am very serious about this: at least three stories and five nursery rhymes a day, if not more, and not only at bedtime, either.
Read with passion and expressive abandon, maintaining the same variety in your voice at exactly the same place in the story or rhyme every time, keeping the same louds and softs, the same highs and lows, the same fasts and slows.
In this manner your children will begin to remember the words by remembering the ‘tune’ of your reading. Memorising a rhyme or story and turning the pages at the right time is an important step in learning to read and should never be discounted as cheating.
Fill their minds with a torrent of wonderful words, familiar and unfamiliar, common and grand, basic and lofty. And always make it a wild and joyful experience.
If a borrowed story book or nursery-rhyme… Read the rest