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Dragons come in many shapes and sizes and speak different tongues. Some are mean, some are kind, some have legs while some don’t. No matter what they all have one thing in common..they grab eyes wherever they go. Join our free children’s book giveaway to read more about these wonderful creatures.
Mandy and grandpa went on a hike . But it was more than that. Together they explored the woods, learnt to be at peace with nature and talked their hearts out about things that mattered. It was a special bond between them and you’ve got to read this great free illustrated children’s book to experience it. Happy Exploring!!
Sandy chances upon an old treasure map and as the events roll out one after another, he becomes richer both by pennies and by thoughts. Here’s a treasure hunt to embark upon in this free children’s storybook. Sail Away Captain! The seven seas are yours.
Shh! Did you hear that? The jungle’s saying a story and you cannot afford to miss it. A colorful narrative set in the woods..camouflaged as a free children’s dog story. Happy Reading!
Jimmy’s starting school and he doesn’t know what’s in store. One step at a time, slowly but surely, he made it to the school bus. And off he went! Just like that. The illustrations in the free bed time book for children evoke sweet memories of that very special first day at school.
He thought he was the Lord of the Farm. He thought he was Boss. But his vanity was short lived and soon he learnt a lesson he’ll never forget. Follow this funny and thoughtful story of a certain farm we chanced upon in this free bedtime storybook.
Children’s learning is series of progressive course, storytelling and reading story books are the very basic methods that reach their budding brain. And these habits support in long term understanding of everything they hear or read. Our free stories books for kids give them great joy of telling different stories that captivates them in reading books as well.
Our free kids story books support you with the best way to improve your kid’s knowledge through demonstrative teaching, this helps kids to identify novel object with the picture in our free story books online for kids. Children pick up fast in this method, as it facilitates their reading and learning ability to easily progress and create great interactivity among the reader, listeners and the book.
The free online storybooks for childrens are designed in such a way, as they read our free story books they can accumulate lot of new words, it increases their understanding of English language better. Gradually, they can give accurate definitions of the new words learned through the free stories for kids. Induce your children’s imagination skills by presenting them personalised picture book to pull up your kid’s cognitive growth.
Our stories are not only fairytales that offers to read traditional stories but also with the books that are informative to gain knowledge about every little thing kids come across, this make them grow by reading interesting and informative books with our free stories for kids.
Our free kids books make your children to easily understand and learn the facts about things that are important in their early education. Travel with Professor Mois Ture take your kids for a ride around water world “Do you wonder about Rain, Snow Sleet and hail?”, and many more to engage in reading the fabulous collection of free story books for kids in online.
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Choosing the right books for your child is important; getting it right the first few times can spark the beginnings of a lifelong enthusiasm for reading. So how can you spot a good children's book amongst the dizzying variety of titles and genres?
Start your free trial of Reading Eggs and let your child enjoy the children's book library, as well as hundreds of phonics and reading lessons that are fun and highly interactive.
Choose books that allow your child to explore different worlds and lives but are still familiar enough that they can see themselves in the characters. Even if it's a story set in an imaginary world of monsters and fairies, if the characters have hopes and desires that are easy to relate to, your child will be more interested in reading it until the end.
Whether it's learning a timeless moral in The Tortoise and the Hare or learning about numbers, fruit, and days of the week in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the best books often teach things without us even realizing it. Choose books that deliver an important message or subtly teach essential skills such as the alphabet, counting, colors, or seasons.
Children's author Libby Gleeson suggests that when choosing a good book for children, parents should “resist the desire only to feed their children the books they loved when they were young”. Your child may not share the same passion for your childhood classics, and, as Gleeson notes, “The world has changed and children have changed.”
Use the Five Finger Rule if your child will be reading on their own. If the book has a few difficult words, read it aloud together with your child. There's nothing wrong with exposing children to more complex language in context. But if you know the language and concepts will be too difficult for them to enjoy the story, avoid putting them off reading altogether by choosing a simpler book.
Vivid and clear imagery that supports the story is powerful for early readers aged 4–8. Choose books that have good illustrations that correspond with the storyline. Wordless books are also a great way to develop your child's language skills, as they require readers to interpret the illustrations as the story progresses.
Short StoriesHow many times has your child requested yet another reading of Dr Seuss? Books that rhyme or have a good lyrical flow are fun to read aloud and listen to. Read with enthusiasm and use different voices for different characters to bring the reading experience to life.
Talk to your child's teacher, librarian, or other parents to find out about popular children's books. Alternatively, search online for award-winning children's book lists or hop onto book review sites to read what other parents are suggesting. Jump on TikTok and check out what’s trending.
At the end of the day, what makes a good children's book is any age‑appropriate book your child wants to read! Let your child choose which books they would like to read because choosing to read over not choosing to read is a significant step towards a lifelong love of reading.
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Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, frequently enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children's general knowledge, understanding about the world, and promotes language acquisition. This collection of papers demonstrates the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and increases our understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that support this learning. Our hope is that this Research Topic/eBook will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children's learning.
We conceptually divide this research topic into four broad sections, which focus on the nature and attributes of picture and story books, what children learn from picture and story books, the interactions children experience during shared reading, and potential applications of research into shared reading, respectively.
The first section of this research topic focuses on the nature and structural attributes of picture and story books that influence the benefits of shared book reading. Three papers report empirical studies exploring how changes in story book attributes influence adult interaction style and child recall of story content (Greenhoot et al., 2014; Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014; Read, 2014). Greenhoot et al. (2014) examine the effect of storybook illustrations. Specifically, they gave parents either illustrated or non-illustrated stories to read with their 3–4-year-old children. Illustrated stories lead to more verbal and non-verbal exchanges between parents and children during shared reading and better recall of the story events by children. Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) explore the impact of narrative structure on book reading style. Parents read picture books to their 21-month-old children that either included contextual illustrations (narrative) or decontextualized illustrations (non-narrative). Although the two types of books elicited the same number of natural facts about animals overall, mothers reading narrative books provided more story-specific statements about the animals while mothers reading non-narrative books provided more labels and physical descriptions of animals. Finally, Read (2014) examined the effect of rhyme on children's learning of names for novel monsters. Two- to four-year-old children heard stories where either monster names did not rhyme with a descriptive feature, or where the name occurred before the feature (non-predictive rhyme) or after the feature (predictive rhyme). Children identified significantly more monsters by name if the names followed a predictive rhyme. Together, this sub-collection of papers demonstrates the dramatic influence picture and storybook attributes can have on parent reading behavior and children's learning.
The next two papers present cross-cultural comparisons of the messages conveyed by storybooks (Suprawati et al., 2014; Vander Wege et al., 2014). Suprawati et al. (2014) compared the nature of the challenges faced by protagonists in story books published in Indonesia, Japan and the United States, along with how these challenges were resolved. Japanese stories contained the largest number of challenges, and a greater proportion of challenges that were resolved by the protagonist alone compared to American stories. In a similar vein, Vander Wege et al. (2014) coded the illustrations of books published in Romania, Turkey and the United States for the depiction of emotional expressions. As predicted by cultural norms, American books showed more intense emotional reactions—especially negative expressions. These studies reveal that story books reflect (and may also teach children about) the values of one's cultural group.
The final two papers in this section consider the methods used by researchers to establish which features of story books best support learning. Wagner (2013) provides an opinion piece arguing for the need of a quantitative database of the content of children's books. She explains how such a database could be used to support theoretical claims about the content of picture books and to identify testable hypotheses about the features that help children learn to retell stories. A second methodological paper, by Burris and Brown (2014), reviews the external validity of narrative comprehension assessments, drawing particular attention to research with children from low-SES and minority populations. They argue that researchers should test comprehension using real-time, on-line assessments during the story reading (e.g., think-aloud protocols, probe questions), as well as off-line assessments of children's comprehension (e.g., free recall, cued recall and story retelling).
The next section in the series focuses on what children learn from storybooks. Three papers focus specifically on word learning (Houston-Price et al., 2014; Khu et al., 2014; Williams and Horst, 2014) and a further six focus on how shared book reading supports developments in children's understanding of people (Abad and Pruden, 2013; Golos and Moses, 2013), animals (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014), food (Heath et al., 2014), and even geometry concepts (Flevares and Schiff, 2014). Khu et al. (2014) demonstrate that teaching 21-month-old toddlers the name of a novel object through a picture book facilitates their ability to learn objects' non-obvious properties (e.g., lighting-up with applied pressure; introduced through a second picture book). Houston-Price et al. (2014) found that both 4- and 6-year-olds were able to provide accurate definitions of new words introduced in stories, but that only the older group formed lexical representations that enabled them to make correct grammaticality judgments about these words. By reading stories immediately before nap time, Williams and Horst (2014) were able to explore the added benefit of sleep on word learning from story books in a preschool sample. Together, these papers add to the literature demonstrating that children acquire new vocabulary knowledge through picture and storybooks (see also Read, 2014) and further elucidate the extent and depth of the knowledge gained.
The next two papers present opinions on how story book characters can help change children's stereotypes. First, Abad and Pruden (2013) synthesize what we know about the influence of story books whose characters engage in atypical gender behavior on children's subsequent play. The authors argue that story books provide a practical (and inexpensive) method for influencing gender stereotypes in a positive way. Golos and Moses (2013) take a similar approach to examining children's perceptions of deaf characters. In addition to reviewing how story books can help present the Deaf community positively, Golos and Moses make recommendations about the quality of the story line required if story books are to captivate and engage children.
The next pair of papers examines the effects of anthropomorphism in story books (Ganea et al., 2014; Waxman et al., 2014). In Ganea et al. (2014), 3–5-year-olds were read books with either anthropomorphic or realistic illustrations and either anthropomorphized or factual language. Both anthropomorphic illustrations and language lead to lower levels of learning, especially for the youngest children. In Waxman et al. (2014), 5-year-old children listened to a book about bears before completing a reasoning task. Children who read a book depicting bears scientifically (e.g., Animal Encyclopedia) generalized properties from one animal to another in the reasoning task (a biological perspective), while those who read a book depicting bears anthropomorphically (e.g., The Berenstain Bears) did not. Note, the stories used by Nyhout and O'Neill (2014) and Greenhoot et al. (2014) also included animals.
The final pair of papers in this section branch out to explore how story books can be used to change children's perceptions of food and mathematics (Heath et al., 2014). Heath et al. (2014) report that looking at picture books about an unfamiliar vegetable with toddlers encourages them to eat the vegetable when it is later offered at a mealtime. The effect was largest for foods that were unfamiliar to children before they saw the books. Heath et al. suggest that picture books might help more broadly to familiarize children with situations that they might otherwise reject. Flevares and Schiff (2014) undertake a chronological review of the evolution of different perspectives on the role of books in supporting school-aged children's learning of mathematical concepts, such as plane geometry. They explore the benefits of using picture-based literature for children's learning of and motivation to engage with mathematics concepts, and for the training of teachers in the delivery of these concepts.
The third section in the series focuses on how children and parents interact with the story and each other during shared reading situations. Two papers in this section focus on the reading behaviors of middle-class African American (Harris and Rothlein, 2014) and Japanese (Murase, 2014) mothers. Harris and Rothlein (2014) found large individual differences in mothers' reading styles. However, the most common narrative-eliciting strategies included questions about the characters and refocusing statements (e.g., directing the child to look back at the illustration). Murase's (2014) 7-month longitudinal study of maternal reading behavior found that mothers initially focus on providing information to children and that they display more requests for information over time. The number of information-seeking requests by mothers was positively correlated with children's productive vocabularies. In the next paper, Kucirkova (2013) reviews how children interact with iPad books, which she suggests offer a useful tool for examining how children engage with stories. Kucirkova also highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the learning opportunities provided by children's increasing experiences with digital media.
The final section of the series takes a more applied angle. Two papers (Adlof et al., 2014; Tsunemi et al., 2014) present preliminary data from interventions using story books that show promise in helping children improve key skills. Adlof et al. (2014) confirmed the feasibility of a new intervention for low-SES children: structured narrative retell instruction (SNRI). In a group intervention, clinicians asked children questions about each component of the narrative (e.g., the characters) after each reading. Children who completed the intervention showed improvements in narrative macrostructure (including the total number and diversity of the words they used and their mean length of utterance) and overall vocabulary scores. Tsunemi et al.'s (2014) intervention aimed to help school-aged children with autism improve their social perspective-taking skills. Parents read narrative books to their children for almost a week and asked questions about the mental states of the characters after each reading. Children in the intervention group improved in their ability to take second- and third-person perspectives in a social perspective-taking task. Together, this pair of feasibility studies suggests that narrative storybooks provide a suitable medium for a range of interventions to support children's development.
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