Learn How to Read with Your Baby

We’ve all heard that we should read with your baby. It’s an important daily routine to begin with your little one. But, if you have tried to read a book to baby, you might find that your little one doesn’t have the attention span for the books you read. For example, they are curious about the world around them and little things or sounds distract them easily. That’s normal and to be expected. Plus, most babies have very short attention spans: usually around a few seconds in the first few months to about 3 – 5 minutes around one years old.

So how exactly does one go about reading with your baby? Well, there are many tips and tricks for sharing books with your little one. My best tip is that it is not about actually reading the words in the book. This is time to share with your little one. This sometimes means reading the story or actual words, sometimes this is exploring the pictures and pointing out what you see, somethings this is just telling the story from the pictures.

Developing a Love of Reading

If you aren’t a great reader, that’s okay too! You can describe the pictures to your child and this counts as reading. Point out what you see or when your baby is a little bigger, let them point to the pictures. Sometimes you name them and your little one finds it, other times you name what you baby points to in the book. Either way, this is time spent reading with your child.

And the more books you share with your child, the better. You will grow your child’s vocabulary, interest in books, and love of reading from this early age. Plus your child might even learn some grammar, sentence structures, and rhymes as you read.

So how should parents get their infants to enjoy books and begin to develop a love for reading? First, set aside time to explore books with your baby. This could be setting out 2 – 5 books for baby to play with while you cuddle with your child.

Different Ways to Read a Book

It might be you holding the books while you name and point to pictures or even make up a story. Maybe you let baby hold the books, put them in the mouth, or randomly turn pages. Moreover, it might be baby sitting on your lap while you read a few pages of the book.

And if your little one is old enough, it could involve your child pointing to pictures and either asking, “What is it?” or naming the picture themselves. This is more about spending time with your little one, setting up a reading routine, and exposing them to lots of new words.

When your little one is brand new and can’t really look at the pictures yet, it’s still good to read to them. Take the time to read aloud anything you enjoy reading, children’s books, or even the newspaper. Right now it’s all about your baby hearing your voice and hearing new words.

Share New Language While you Read with your Baby

Second, find books with fun language. The more that you read with your child, the better your child’s language skills will evolve. Language skills help your child not only to understand what is being said, but also to use the words themselves. Plus, reading with your children helps them to develop a greater vocabulary and learn about the world around them. Additionally, some books are great just to read, but many books are wonderful for teaching concepts as well like colors, shapes, names of objects, animal sounds, etc.

Favorite Books to Read with Your Baby

Below are some of our favorite books to read with our babies from the day they are born, but become favorites throughout the toddler years too. For infants, we love cloth books so that they can explore. Board books are nice for older infants and toddlers as the pages are more sturdy. Especially when you little one starts to put everything in their mouth. These books were made for that, so don’t fret if that’s what you baby does.

Develop Language

Goodnight Moon is a favorite story to read before bedtime and explore different objects baby might see in their life. It is also a great book to help build your child’s vocabulary with items from around the house. Spend some time finding the words in the pictures, but also talk about the other items you see in the pictures too.

Plus it includes many rhymes throughout the book. This is a great book to focus on rhyming words as your little one grows. The language is so fun to read and the rhymes really roll off the tongue. Our children have enjoyed this book at all ages and our older ones love to read this book to their younger siblings at bedtime too!

Visual Stimulation

Look Look! is a great addition to any library for a little one. Babies begin their life seeing only in black and white colors. These beautiful black and white illustrations will draw baby’s attention and provide beautiful visual stimulation. Plus the red contrast to the black and white is a great color contrast for your little one’s eyes.

While Global Babies includes beautiful pictures of a variety of baby faces. Not only does this book allow your little one to enjoy a favorite activity: looking at faces, but it introduces your little one to babies of different ethnicities and cultures in today’s world. This is a great book to learn a little more about the beautiful differences that exist in our world but also how similar we truly are as well.

Animals

Good Night Gorilla and Hello, Day! are two great stories for introducing animals and their sounds to your baby. Both have beautiful pictures and few words to delight your little one.

The sneaky gorilla will become a favorite before you know it. My children love to name the animals that he lets out of the cages and enjoy trying to match the animals to their eyes in the dark bedroom. And it’s so fun to make their animal sounds too. In addition, the beautiful illustrations help to keep their attention through the story.

Hello Day focuses more on the sounds that animals make. This book includes many different farm animals, which are always a favorite. These are animal noise most adults know well and delight in listening to their child imitate them. Plus animal sounds are a great transition from making cooing noises to making words as so many of these sound like baby coos, but are actually recognizable words to adults.

Be sure to spend some time describing the pictures and the colors of the different flowers. And if you little one notices, each picture of the animals comes together at the end to make one big scene. It’s really cute how the individual pictures build together to make a larger scene.

Body Parts

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes as well as Where is Baby’s Belly Button are two great board books to introduce your little one to him/herself. Each book focuses on different body parts. Take the time to read and then explore yours and baby’s body parts too.

Also, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes introduces baby to their multicultural world and ways in which they are similar to others. Isn’t it great to see that we are all the same in so many ways? Your baby will love the close ups and enjoy seeing baby too.

While Where is Baby’s Belly Button is a great peek-a-boo book that lets your little one move flaps to discover different body parts. Teaching body parts is such a fun and interactive way to engage with your little one and what better way than to do it with a book. Lift the peek-a-boo flap and discover the body part, then see if your little one can find the same body part on you or himself. And if not just yet, help your little one find their body parts.

Colors

Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Colors are great ways to introduce colors to your little one. Both have very vivid pictures with lots of color.

Moreover, Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a favorite in my home because it adds in animals with the colors and often becomes the first book my little ones read to me! That’s always an exciting day. The repetitive sentence structure works well with the pictures for early reading. Plus the colors often do not match the animals which is fun for my little one to correct. Who doesn’t like to be “smarter” than the author?

While Colors introduces the colors to your baby in a more straightforward way. This is a great book to read beginning around 3 months and up as you little one will begin to see more than black and white around this time, usually developing most colors by 5 months of age. This is a great book for showing your child that colors have many different shades and tints. Thus helping your child to learn that multiple shades are all called blue. Plus there are so many different pictures to name and point at while reading which is engaging for your little one.

Develop Vocabulary

Finally Baby’s First 100 Words and other similar books are great books for introducing vocabulary to your little one. These books are full of beautiful pictures and a word describing each picture. At first, you can choose a few pages to share with your little one and name the different objects on the page. Within time, your little one will name the objects to you as you continue to enjoy these books together.

These books focus on common vocabulary that your little one will encounter in their day to day life. Moreover, baby can begin to match their real life objects with the words and pictures in the book. We loved pairing these books with sign language or even Spanish. Such a great way to grow your baby’s vocabulary and knowledge of the world around them.

Tips for Reading with Your Baby

Set aside time to explore books together. In the beginning this doesn’t need to be long, just a few minutes a day. As your child grows, you can explore more books, add stories to bedtime and naptime routines, and even begin to enjoy the library together.

Remember, there are many ways to read a story. You can read the words that the author has written. However, it can be even more fun to read the pictures, pointing at what you see and naming everything you can. You can also retell the story using the pictures without actually reading the words. Babies just love to hear our voice and the more they hear you the more they will want you to hear them too.

Enjoy the language with your baby. Find books you love the language, vocabulary and even sentence structure to share with your baby. If you love the language, you’ll enjoy reading the story multiple times. Additionally, we are drawn to books that sound like poetry or are easy to read aloud. Not only will your little one hear new sentence structures, but they will learn new words too.

As your little one grows, you’ll need some toddler books too. Be sure to check out Reading with your Toddler too. For more tips on developing interest in books, try out our Learning to Read Series beginning with Developing Interest. Leave us a comment below to let us know your favorite books to read with baby and how you enjoy reading with your little one.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.