Even toddlers can gravitate towards certain types of books. It’s interesting how kids at two or three years old tend to like certain topics or themes, almost innately.  My grandsons spend a lot of time playing with trucks, backhoes, excavators- basic machinery.  But they also love to look at books about this all of this machinery!

How does this happen?  Can it be that exposure to books and to information simply generates a LOVE OF LEARNING? 

According to “When do Kids Learn to Read?” by Dr Jody Sherman LeVos (BeginLearning.com):  Kids who are read to, who have parents modeling a love of reading, and who have books as part of their everyday life tend to be more excited to learn to read. These children also develop essential pre-literacy skills, such as print awareness. Print awareness is a broad term that includes familiarity with different forms of text (books, menus, newspapers, magazines, street signs, etc.), understanding print structure, and knowing how to hold these sources of information correctly.  Without print awareness, it’s hard to connect text in a meaningful way and understand the words and phrases on a page.

“Print awareness” is a pre-reading skill, a prerequisite for reading that can occur in the toddler years.   Simply put, it is the awareness that what is being said aloud connects to what is being shown on the page.   So, it’s easy to make the connection that the more picture books we expose our kids to, the more we are setting them up to be good readers.

But even more important than simple exposure is this: what we read to our kids matters.   As believers, we know there is a spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of our children (Ephesians 6:12). Truth and purity are not the popular topics of the day or things that our littles are going to naturally be exposed to.  We try to protect our kids from inappropriate language, images, and ideas.  But we may need to do more that protect them- we need to equip them (Armor of God, Ephesians 6:10-18).

It’s our job as parent and grandparents to share the gospel with our littles from the very start.  It’s not the job of the pastor, the Sunday School teacher, or the youth pastor.  These “gifts from God” have been placed in our care, and what an honor that is.  With that honor, comes responsibility.

As we BOOK TIME WITH OUR KIDS, we should certainly expose them to stories about colors and shapes, animals, trucks (and machinery!), and to clever stories with rhythm and rhyme.  But let’s be intentional about reading them stories about Jesus, about miracles from the Bible, about kindness and forgiveness, and about how they are created by and loved by God. I know this, when I read a book about Jesus to my grandson, his eyes light up and he knows there’s something special about this story.  All I have to do is read the words or sing the song and the Lord does the rest.  All we have to do is simply choose….choose to lead our littles in love.   If exposure to books can generate a love of learning, exposure to Jesus can do even so much more!

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