The Role of Reading Storybooks in Aiding Literacy in Children

Storybooks are an exciting way for children to discover the world around them. In a typical African setting, reverence is highly accorded stories and story-telling sessions, as a way of providing basic education. In the modern world however, reading stories has stood out remarkably as consistently having the power to create interactive content that nurtures intellectual development in young children.

Most of a child's learning is done from reading books. Children learn easiest when content is conveyed in a manner that's appealing to them and in ways easy to recall.

Things that happen everyday. And what better way than through storybooks?

Reading storybooks helps children with language acquisition and literacy skills, when they are exposed to learning material early in life. Reading helps the child to know sounds, words and language, and develop literacy skills, which prepare them to understand the written word. Reading stories aids the process of cognitive development and improves the functioning of the brain. Storybooks employ the eminent feature of skilful imagination and fiction based on real-life events.

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This enables children to relate them with their life experiences and see how diverse, and vastly different, the world and other people's lives are from theirs.

On another level, stories develop curiosity in children when new ideas about other planets, fantastical worlds, invented characters and different points in time are introduced. These characters they get to know, become like friends. Knowing other persons they can relate to boosts their confidence levels and they are able to fully participate in activities.

As children interact with the rest of the world through storybooks, they learn to value books and reading in general, which essentially provides them with background knowledge on their young worlds and helps them to make sense of what they see, hear and read. Reading storybooks broadens a child's vocabulary capacity and increases their knowledge base. Coupled with the exciting nature of stories, children develop better concentration and improved attention spans.

Stories can be quite useful for teaching complex ideas like the importance of sharing, kindness, compassion and tolerance; how to live with one another. They are very useful when attempting to explain traumatic experiences like death, calamities or unusual life situations. Through reading stories, children are made to understand that feelings are meant to be expressed and that it is normal.

Experiencing these emotions in a safe environment allows the child to think of themselves in similar situations and enables them to develop coping mechanisms. This prepares them for future interactions and enhances problem-solving capabilities, thus making their development more well-rounded and mature. And what's most exciting about learning through stories is that the process is natural with no actual teaching involved- only learning from simply reading stories.