Exploring Books with All your Senses
My elementary age daughters are very much into the “Harry Potter” series these days. Not only have they read and reread the first 2 books in the series, they have loved watching the movies and they recreate scenes and events from the stories in their free play! (They were playing with pretend wands, brooms, and pretend robes last night, and I even overheard a couple of made up spells 😄) Living proof that even older children love HANDS-ON PLAY!
Our senses make up our experiences! We are constantly taking in information using all our senses - the feel of the keys on my fingers as I type this blog, the smell of tea in the cup next to me, the sound of my children playing in the background, the awareness of the chair keeping me upright to type, and even the internal feeling of being relaxed and calm. And this shapes how we experience the world around us and how we respond to everything and everyone around us. Did you know that we have not five, but actually 8 known senses (and probably more that have not been discovered or studied yet, or not understood fully)? I’ll write more later about these senses, how we use them, how we learn from them, how they impact us, and what it means when there is a problem in sensory processing.
Children are naturally inclined to explore their environment using all their senses. A baby loves to explore with their hands and mouth. A toddler constantly touches new objects, climbs, pushes, throws, squeezes, and invariably hears “No” or “Stop” 238 times in a day. A preschooler notices the tiniest creatures and plants in their outdoor excursions, wants to do everything on their own, and always asks “HOW” and “WHY”. This is why I love using books with young children and bringing books to life with them to explore new words, concepts, feelings, even foods, using all their senses, including their bodies, and create experiences.
As parents we know the importance of reading books to our children, and we start at a very young age. We bring touch-and-feel and interactive books for our babies, picture books with bright and colorful pictures as they get older, and even use books to build night-time routines and to bond with our children. We read books with rhyming words, books about their special interests - like planets, dinosaurs, bugs, or special holidays and events. But imagine your child’s excitement if you also created a model of the solar system or an exploding volcano while reading a book about them! Imagine cooking up a favorite treat while reading about their favorite holiday! Imagine pretending to be animals at a farm or zoo, while reading about them! This makes reading the books extra fun, gets their bodies moving, and helps build the foundational skills children need to develop reading skills but also a continued “love of reading” in the later years.
Here’s to creating many Reading Adventures with our children!!!