One of the best things you can do to support your child’s learning at a Montessori centre is to read to them.   This is especially the case when your child is at the stage of learning the letters of the alphabet and when he/she is learning to read.

However, you don’t have to wait until the Montessori teacher mentions that your child is beginning to work/play with sandpaper letters and the moveable alphabet.   Reading to your child should begin a long time before this and should continue long after your child is reading confidently in fact, nobody’s too old for having a story read to them!

Reading to your child isn’t just about exposing them to the printed word and to the alphabet.   At first, reading to your child when he/she is a baby is an excellent way of increasing their vocabulary.   Later, your child will learn how to identify various things in the world around them via pictures in books naming and identifying colours is easy to do using books.   Later, when a child is learning to indentify letters, he or she will be able to pick them out on the page as you read and you can probably point out some of the letters they already know.   Later still, your child will be able to read a few of the words on the page and read to you.

And don’t forget the facts that a child is absorbing while you read to him or her.   Only some of us will have the chance to take our children to a foreign country, but everyone can find out about the African savannah through books to say nothing of how we can learn about places and times we can never visit physically like periods in history or outer space!   Books also provide good discussion points on concepts such as morals, good manners and good citizenship you can talk about whether the characters in a story did (or didn’t) do the right thing.

And reading with your child is great bonding time never forget that!

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