Tips for Reading Aloud With Babies

Read aloud so babies can:

Associate reading with warm, pleasant feeling

Hear sounds, rhythms, and words

Use their senses: listening, seeing, and touching

Make their own sounds: cooing, gurgling, babling

Begin to understand that pictures represent objects

Point to pictures

Choose books babies enjoy, including:

For younger babies

Board books with simple, bright pictures against solid backgrounds

Light, washable cloth and vinyl books they can easily grasp

Nursery rhyme books and other stories with set rhymes

For older babies

Brightly colored board books featuring only one or two objects per page

Books with bright pictures of animals, babies, and familiar objects

Books with textures, things to touch, flaps to lift, or holes to poke

While reading aloud:

Hold your baby in your lap; make sure she can see the pictures

Expect your baby to touch, grasp, and taste—that is how she learns

Offer your baby a toy to hold and chew while listening to you read

Let your baby turn pages if she is more interested in the book than listening

Point to, name, and talk about things in the illustrations

Play with words, sing, and make up rhymes

Read one or two pages at a time; gradually lengthen the number of pages

Encourage a baby to join in, to moo like a cow or finish a repetitive phrase

Stay on a page as long as your baby is interested

Put the book away and do something else when she loses interest