In the world of children, books are not just for reading. They are also for doing, for talking, for asking to see and use again and again. A good children’s book is one that becomes a favorite place to go with one’s imagination. I am always on the lookout for interactive books that children of all ages can enjoy with their parents, because it is one of the best vehicles to help develop language in a very active way.
Researchers have clearly stated that passive activities such as television and similar media, do not foster language and vocabulary development for children. Rather, it is the social interaction of humans that creates those language networks in a child’s brain. Sometimes, however, adults get stuck. What do we talk about? How do we keep that conversation going? What is this language-labeling thing teachers keep talking about? This is where books come in. Everything has a name. We night not know the name for something, but I assure it – everything has a name, and children need to know those names. That is the start of a child’s world knowledge, because if they don’t have a word for something, they cannot retain it in memory and cannot use it in conversation.
For example, I was working with a 14-year-old and we got onto the subject of various forms of energy for heating homes. I asked him how his home was heated, and he didn’t know. I asked him if there was something in the basement that might look like it would heat the house. He eventually told me that that was a “big tin can in the corner” and “a little box that got sort of hot” somewhat near it. I concluded that they had oil heat in the home. This is a child with an average IQ, who lived in a very upper middle-class home in an affluent neighborhood and who had very little conversational experience with respect to language-labeling his world. That was the reason he was in the language clinic in the first place. The bottom line was, he had been placed in front of a television or similar passive entertainment and left to his own devices. His parents simply didn’t know what to do with bringing up a child and thought that buying expensive technology was the answer.
Wrong. What this child, just like every child, needed was interactive language and books! One of my new favorites for age three and up is “The Wind-Up Bus” by Fiona Watt. This nifty book is one of a series of wind-up books and it includes a small mechanical model of a red, double-decker London bus. Each page has a track that the bus follows, and the four tracks can be taken out of the book and joined together to make one huge track to travel around the city. This exposes children to another culture, with all those famous London landmarks. The parent and child can stop the bus along the way and discuss each point of interest.
Two of my favorite three-year-old acquaintances, Lucas and Henry, love their wind-up books and their parents have the opportunity to ask questions, and talk about cities and what you might find there. The boys zoom the bus around the tracks, talk about all the sights, and they have begun to use their imagination to make up stories about what they and the bus are finding in the city.
Speaking of what you can find in a city – one of the best places for me is a museum. Often, we rely on those ubiquitous school field trips to cover the museum tours for our kids. Sadly, this is really just the tip of the iceberg with respect to a real museum experience. Children need sufficient background knowledge of what they are going to experience (including language-labeling of items they will be viewing!), to really benefit from any museum exposure.
“Build Your Own History Museum” by Claudia Martin is the newest in the Lonely Planet Kids series and it helps us learn what a museum is all about. It is also a delight. The book contains a “crate” of paper treasures from the ancient world.
With parental help, as this is age five through ten, the child and parent assemble each artifact to get it ready for the museum opening. This creates a way for conversation, questions, discovery, searching for answers, and a general good time.
Discovery is paramount and one example would be making sure the artifacts go to the correct room – you cannot have an Egyptian sarcophagus sitting with the Chinese Terracotta Army! This book is not only interactive, it has a plethora of vocabulary words that many of us would not otherwise learn. One example is the word “lamassus.” Go ahead, look it up, I’ll wait.
I told you – everything has a name.
This book is also a fun way to introduce timelines, learn about ancient folks and their cultures and traditions, and how people all over the antediluvian world lived and worked.
Of course, in my opinion, no museum is any good without medieval times well represented. “Knightology” by Dugald A. Steer , for grades four through middle school, is the latest in the “ology” series, and my current favorite pick for this era.
A letter starts this interactive book. It is from “Sir Lancelot Marshall,” asking readers (would-be knights) to help defend England and solve a puzzle. The puzzle clues throughout the book help the child find the last resting place of King Arthur and Excalibur.
Children and parents get to travel back in time with an incredibly detailed history of knighthood, and battles, horses, and armor. I loved the excellent information found on each page. For example, spiral stairs in castles veer to the left so that attacking soldiers’ use of their right hand is limited. Of course, as a left-hander, I would definitely have the advantage! How many left-handed kids will get a real kick out of that? The Crusades are well covered along with those knights of legend, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Gawain. For the younger reader, or a child who is struggling with vocabulary knowledge, this interactive book is the perfect vehicle to read with an adult who can talk, guide, discuss, and provide that so much needed background knowledge.
And for my reader who is a collector of all things pirate (I know you’re out there), the companion book “Pirateology” is also available.
These are the type of book parents and children can return to again and again, finding out new information, searching the illustrations with familiarity and still discovering something new every time. Books that are for talking are a valuable addition to a child’s library and a way to ensure that they will eventually n avigate their world with confidence and ease.