Prenatal stage
Currently there is talk of the importance of the conversations that a mother can have with the child she carries in her womb and the recommendations that she talk to her baby, sing to her, make her listen to music … And those conversations are the first sensations that her family can give to the being that will be born.
Maternal stage
From the birth of the baby, the family begins to have a great importance in their reading training. It will be essential for parents to remember and remember all those songs and stories that were told to them as children. When the child is able to sit up, the first picture books will appear.
These are very simple books that show objects close to the experiences of that child and, again, it will be the parents or grandparents, who will introduce them to the world of symbolism. It is time to sit the child or grandchild on their knees and turn the pages, and without realizing it they will be teaching them many other things than the mere act of reading, such as learning directionality through turning the pages. from left to right.
Preschool stage
Around two or three years of age, the child comes into contact with events, events and characters that take place in a distant time : the time of fiction. Parents become storytellers at the edge of the bed or on the sofa in the living room. It is the time of once upon a time and the time of life-long stories: fairies, witches …, of overflowing fantasy, in short. And in this phase, parents will also be giving their children reading models : pauses, inflections, tones when they question, when they exclaim or whisper … they are telling them that words have tones, cadences, nuances and sounds.
Stage of the first primary schooling
This stage encompasses the literacy process that theoretically offers the child that magic trick to access all the readings and all possible books , but which is one of the main culprits of the loss of interest in reading. The effort required to decipher this arbitrary and capricious code that is written language is so intense that if it is not well directed it can destroy the strength of the child reader.
It is the moment when parents are truly essential, but also when they have it most difficult, because they can fall into the role of teacher without realizing that they are still parents and not teachers. You can read a mealtime recipe together, ask to bring the story that says such a thing on the cover, or look in the newspaper for that TV show you like so much. All this always with great patience, since in this way it helps to solve the errors that will occur in this reading phase.
Stage of the last years of primary schooling
Children grow up, but even if they seem older and no longer need parents so much, you have to be there at the foot of the bed, because it is important to ensure that faith in the magic of books and their powers of deciphering is kept alive . We must continue to share the pleasure of reading aloud with children, and that is why it is necessary for parents to continue reading to their children stories that are increasingly complex and deep, and the ideal place is the edge of the bed at the moment in which the son or daughter goes to sleep.
In this way, the habit of particular conditions of time and space will be created ; an atmosphere of introspection and intimacy that, from now on, he will associate with reading and that may become an indispensable habit for him throughout his life: “read a while to call to sleep” or “read, even ten minutes, before to turn off the light ”.
