king-frog When is the last time you spoke to a family member and began your sentence, “Once upon a time?” Or how often do you tell your kids, “I do not like them Sam I am, I do not like green eggs and ham.”

We don’t talk like that because that, my friends, is book language. Book language is richer and fancier and…well, crazier than normal everyday talk. It has a bigger vocabulary, it has words for sounds like Bang! or Pop! It goes back to days of old and forward to the future. (The flux capacitor, for instance.)

Who cares? Well, you and I should when we’re getting our children ready to read. They need to hear hundreds of stories in all kinds of book language to be ready to decipher words and understand the meaning in stories.

When you read to your children, you unwittingly teach them a number of things about books. They’ll learn how to hold a book and which direction the words go. They’ll learn to track the lines of writing from left to right. They’ll know that voices go up and down in both pitch and intensity as they hear the words and they’ll learn that books contain language we don’t use in our everyday speech around the house.

So keep on reading to your children. You’ll build their background knowledge about words and stories. You’ll prepare them for the great adventure called learning to read.

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