Books are a wonderful, unfortunately often underestimated, medium in (multilingual) language development and as teaching aids in general.
Books can actually do EVERYTHING:
They provide the imagination of our children with new, exciting images and stimulate them to spin stories – and (important for us as parents) they help to understand language and its structure as well as to build up vocabulary.
picture books
Books can not only be read / read aloud – especially with younger children – there are much more exciting (and also more meaningful) ways to coax their magic out of them!
PICTURES in books shouldn’t be underestimated – they help us to create ideas and inner images and can form the basis of many other inner narratives.
This is why picture books (even if they can do without written language) are a wonderful medium, not only for bilingual children.
The right book
We all know this – how many books have we already bought that are abandoned on the shelf because they haven’t captured us or our children?
How many books turned out to be too difficult, too easy, too boring or even too exciting …?
But how do we find the RIGHT book?
Whether our children like a book depends on numerous factors:
Who wrote it? Who is the author?
Which genre is it? (Novel, short stories, comics …)
What kind of story is it about? (Fantasy, adventure, detective …)
But above all:
Does it address my child’s interests?
Reading age
And of central importance for multilingual children:
Does the book correspond to the reading age of the child?
Every publisher uses different criteria to recommend a book for an age group, but these recommendations apply to monolingual children.
Here are some examples of what children should be able to read at what age or what is assumed for monolingual children:
Reading goals year 1:
The child should correctly recognize and pronounce all German letters and sounds: AZ, umlauts (Ö, Ä, Ü), compound letters: Äu, Eu, Ei, Ie, St, Sp, Ch, Sch.
Monolingual children of this age can commonly read and write simple words and short stories
Reading goals year 2:
Children of this age can read and share a short book. They manage to find specific information in short texts
Reading goals year 3:
At this age, children come into contact with various children’s book authors and learn to comment on what they have read. You can usually read word-for-word and across lines.
Reading goals year 4:
Monolingual children of this age manage to read age-appropriate texts in a meaningful way and have acquired various text indexing methods.
You can obtain information from different media.
Children of this age have also learned to understand word, sentence and text structures
Since multilingual children naturally deviate from these classifications, it is important to understand and weigh these parameters well in relation to your own child before choosing a suitable book.
My service therefore offers in-depth book advice.
In our book boxes you will not only find books that correspond to your child’s interests, but above all books that also correspond to reading and text comprehension skills.