Building Character and Bonding through Reading

Objectives:

• Be aware of the importance and benefits of bonding with your child
• Character education through stories
• Bonding through reading
• Tips to select books, read to child and encouraging reading

Bonding:

Between parents and child

• Forming a mutual emotional attachment
• Giving unconditional love
• Emotional connection of development
• Establishment of emotional intimacy and sense of closeness
• Transmission of familiar ties through nonverbal communication

Child

• Development of a sense of security for child
• Feel a healthy self-worth and self-esteem
• Have sense of belonging to a family and introduced to the larger network of caring and love
• Reciprocal love and concern

Over-bonding:

• Child cannot develop a sense of individual personality or autonomy, take responsibility
• Parents becomes guilt-ridden, spends entire life, energy, efforts and health for the sake of child

How is bonding manifested?

• Degree of bonding reliant on parent’s attitude and interest in child
• Way the child is held or touched
• How comfortable child is when entering a strange environment

> Child’s ability to be secure in a social environment

> Child’s degree of self – confidence

> Child’s sense of self-concept and self-esteem

How to bond?

• Interaction and show your love
• Quality time
• Give attention and teach
• Mutual respect
• Allow choices
• Know when to let go

Obstacle to bonding:

• Unhealthy pregnancy
• Extreme discomfort during delivery
• Premature birth
• Sickly child
• Child’s behavior
• School-related problems
• Special needs
• Marital warfare
• Child seeking independence and autonomy

Benefits of bonding:

• Allow child to thrive
• Secure bond reflects

> How well child does in school

> How child builds relationships with friends

> How child reacts to stressful or new situations

• Learn to be self-reliant
• Enjoy peer relationships
• Influences attendance and achievement in school
• Creates within child sense of confidence and positive attitude
• Life lasting effect on child
• Sociable and gregarious vs antisocial, withdrawn, hostile and aggressive

Parent-Child Bonding:

Paternal

• Many ways to bond
• 25% stay home dads
• Get an early look
• Bond by age 7, children more likely to have successful marriages, obtain higher education
• Strong paternal bond improved academic performance, fostered closer relationships and created better physical health

Maternal

• During pregnancy
• Interaction before birth
• During routine care
• Bonding may be delayed
• Child reaps lifelong effects

> More self-confidence, leads to better school performance, forming more meaningful and lifelong relationships, less substance abuse or unlawful acts

Ways to improve bonding:

• Relax with child on your lap
• Physical touch
• Talking with eye contact
• Set realistic expectations
• Speak respectfully in a loving and caring manner
• Play and tickle
• Listen with empathy and understand
• Be supportive
• Give space for child to grow
• Unconditional love, guidance and support

Character education through stories:

• Knowing the good, desiring the good and doing the good
• Telling stories recognized as important part of healing, self-knowledge and imparting knowledge
• Stories influence behavior and shape culture with shared meaning and values – fables, natural, cultural, history
• Psychologists – good way to teach children realistic thinking, as stories can show children how people realistically solve their problem
• Effective in influencing how children think and behave because they like to hear or read them over and over again. Combined with their imaginations, stories influence their thinking
• Reading aloud stories can create emotional attachment to goodness, a desire to do the right thing
• Stories provide wealth of examples that are often missing from child’s day to day environment
• Stories familiarize children with codes of conduct they need to know
• Stories help them make sense of life
• Explain differences between right and wrong cannot touch children on the level where it matters – the level of imagination
• Imagination = “image” – a mental picture

> Picture or image moves moral principle into action

Teaching values:

Toddlers

• Early language acquisition stage
• Forming self-concept
• Parallel play without interruption
• 
  

3-5 year olds

• Increasing aware of environment
• More social and concerned about friendship
• Dramatic play to distinguish between reality and imagination

5-7 year olds

• Able to generalize, reason, engage in abstract thinking
• Increase in understanding of numeracy
• Distinguish between right and wrong

Bonding through reading:

• Simple way to

> Take time out and focus on the family

> Establish strong and nurturing bond

> Accomplish quality communication and enjoy bond

• · Enriches quality time – read bedtime story
• Gives parents opportunity to forge secure and loving bond

Benefits of reading aloud:

• Best tool for bonding and opens up the world to child
• Promotes knowledge and education
• Priced strong, positive influence and build a foundation for a lifetime of significant benefits
• Fun – tickle, use different voices, sounds, facial expressions, act out words
• Fosters meaningful one-on-one communication
• Molds child to become readers and lifelong success
• Vital and integral in raising a reader – child learns how to read by being read to
• Reader develops

> Ability to write in correct grammatical form and understand power of written word

> Strong reading comprehension and vocabulary skills

> Ability to express verbally and in writing, more confidently, creatively and easily

> Imagination, curiosity and ability to think “outside the box”

• · Helps child to grasp vocabulary, master words and language
• Increases attention span
• Builds listening skills (force them to practice), conditions reading mechanics
• Expands child’s horizons, quells fears, exposure to new situations, teaches appropriate behavior
• Provides opportunities for teachable moments
• Picture books enable child to appreciate arts, illustrations
• Child stores information in his brain about language and words, context, sentences, grammar, syntax and the differing meanings of language for future use

·

10000 fathers reading:

• To cultivate good reading habits
• Increased fathers’ involvements in literacy development and bonding
• Reading aloud
• Read a story together
• Reading corner to spark interest and discover love for reading
• Immerse in fascination stories
• Supplementary activities

> Create puppets, masks, story cards, ABC Book

> Share own stories

Make reading fun:

• Find new places to read together
• Visit a library/book stores
• Give book gifts
• Shared reading
• Read in turn
• Sing songs, recite rhymes, play games, use different voices
• Bring child into story – be the hero, use different characters
• Get child to participate
• Choose colorful picture books with simple or no words
• Read with expression
• Hold and let child see pictures clearly
• Let child play with book
• Help child develop phonemic awareness
• Tell stories
• Encourage older child to read to siblings
• Be an example

Choosing the right books:

• Guide children to select appropriate books of interests
• Make frequent library trips

Emergent readers

• Recognize few words
• Very short stories (8 pages) with few words on each page
• Contain familiar but interesting objects or actions and are predictable and patterned eg.Brown bear brown bear, going on a bear hunt, eric carle books

Early readers

• Love humor and rhymes
• Short and patterned books with large text and many picture clues
• Have simple concepts and predictability, text includes complex sentences for deeper reading
• Simple non-fiction books, books of interests, thematic books

Independent readers

• Children have ability but not always motivation to read simple books independently
• Have varied vocabulary, text size, number of pages and pictures
• Silly books with real life context and unfamiliar words

Reading tips:

Birth to toddlers

• Sing lullabies and songs
• Choose picture books with one or two pictures per page
• Read child’s favorite books often
• Choose board or plastic books with textures or smells or that make sounds
• Engage child physically in reading by clapping out rhymes or bouncing on your knee as you tell a story

Preschoolers (3 – 5 year olds)

• Read stories with catchy, repeated phrases
• Choose books with rhyming words and nonsense words
• Choose short stories that relate to everyday events
• Select books about real things, like trucks or farm animals
• Expand child’s world by reading folk tales and fairy tales from different countries
• Look for stories that can be acted out like “Three little pigs”

Beginning readers (6 – 8 year olds)

• Choose short stories with more words per page
• Look for pictures that match the text
• Explore simple character books with bigger print for easy reading
• Let child choose books about people, places and things that interest him
• Introduce simple magazines
• Have fun with jokes and riddle books

Way to encourage reading:

• Plan time to read regularly
• Expose child to print rich environment
• Offer choices – borrow/buy
• Take time to look at and talk about the pictures
• Point out the details, ask questions
• Build partnership with school

How to read to your child

Before

• Introduce book

During

• Allow child to look at and talk about the pictures
• Talk about the characters and story events
• Ask open-ended questions
• Allow child to ask questions

After

• Go back to beginning, allow child to turn pages
• Have child retell story
• Compare the story situations to experiences
• Read slowly with expression
• Follow words with finger
• Point to pictures and label them
• Talk about the book and ask children to predict/repeat/describe

Reading milestones:

• 4 months – child listens and observes
• 6 months – child grabs books to chew or suck
• 8 months – child turn pages
• 1 year – point to objects to match words or imitate noises
• 2 years – interested in everything especially picture books
• 3- 4 years - teach initial sounds, alphabets
• Preschoolers

> Re-read familiar

> Build reading accuracy and comprehension

> Teach lower case letters first

> Do not worry about grammar

> Teach writing along with reading

> Limit initial reading vocabulary

> Build on what they know

> Give opportunities to practice

> Explore print around them