What Are Reading Workshops For Children?
During childhood, we often associate our children’s hobbies with sports or outdoor games. However, beyond the benefits of these activities and how necessary they are, we can also appeal to recreations that aim at the cognitive. Reading workshops for children are a great option for this.
If you are looking to bring your little one closer to reading or if, instead, you are looking to initiate him in some extracurricular activity, reading workshops for children are an alternative that you should consider.
First, because they are a great complement to school and sports activities. Each of them will contribute to the integral formation of the little one.
But they also constitute a space where they can have fun, enhance their imagination and forge friendships with children of the same age. Next, we detail the benefits that reading generates in children and the convenience of these workshops.
Benefits of reading for children
Reading is an extremely positive activity for cognitive development, especially if it is practiced from an early age. These are the reasons:
- It develops their linguistic skills: the child who reads has fewer spelling errors, uses more words and in a better way and, in addition, is able to elaborate grammatically complex sentences more easily than others his age.
- It puts the brain to work: Like writing, reading a story, a book, a novel or a comic requires attention, concentration and memory. In addition, many stories appeal to the capacity for reflection, which stimulates the abstraction of the little ones and instills in them values.
- Improves his ability to communicate: by learning new terms, the child considerably improves his ability to express himself orally and in writing.
- It has a positive impact on their school performance: by reading, the child will incorporate data retention techniques, work their memory and learn to organize the incorporated knowledge. This, later, can be transferred to academic texts.
Finally, we must not forget that many children take real pleasure from reading. Of course, this is a fundamental aspect of any of your activities: you should have fun doing them.
What are reading workshops for children?
The reading workshops for children seek to create a space to share stories, poetry or any other type of written story. They can be given as part of the school curriculum or outside of it and are directed by a teacher, who is in charge of reading the stories and commanding the activities that are carried out around it.
In general, academic spaces such as classrooms are sought, but they can also take place in libraries. This is very beneficial, because children know this space and assimilate it as an endless trunk to turn to when they need a book.
Likewise, reading workshops for children pursue the following objectives:
- Reflect on literary materials in the mother tongue.
- Analyze the stories, their characters, their themes and their teachings.
- Pay attention to the tools used to narrate the events.
- Explore the different literary styles to bring each child closer to the one that interests them the most.
How to start my child in reading?
This is certainly not a very easy task. Today, children have too many distractions at their fingertips: cell phones, computers, video games and television. All of them have the advantage that they do not require effort and stimulate many senses at the same time, which generates great entertainment in children.
However, it is clear that the benefits of a good read are much greater. For this reason, reading workshops for children are an excellent alternative, since they provide a meeting place with their peers in which there are no distractions. Here you can truly focus on the joy of reading a good story.
Likewise, there are also a couple of habits that you can form from home. The first is the example: if the boy sees that you read, surely he will be attracted and will want to imitate you.
Second, you must bring him closer to reading from a very young age. How? Reading him stories every night, buying him comics, magazines or any other material that he likes and, of course, showing him how entertaining this activity can be.
A book allows a child to escape to a world where his imagination and characters lead him to wonderful experiences and learnings. In addition, in the long term it will become a traveling companion who will always be available in moments of joy or uneasiness. Don’t stop opening the door to this extraordinary universe for your little one.
