The Best Books to Read to a Four-Year-Old
According to the Child Development Institute, four is an age when children begin to increasingly use adult vocabulary and form complete sentences. They can tell stories---and they can also appreciate stories that others tell. Connecting the stories with sensory perception engages the four-year-old more than relying on words alone, though. Books that encourage experiencing sounds, images, and shapes hold a lot of appeal for this age group. Clever adults can even add aromas by asking questions like, "What does the Cat in the Hat's pink cake smell like?"
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Rhyming Books
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Rhyming books get kids thinking about what comes next. Rhymes can draw children into a story. Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss), wrote titles such as "The Cat in the Hat" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" that are beloved for their compelling rhymes, and these books have remained popular with pre-school kids since they were first published in the 1950s. In the "Reading Resource Book," childhood literacy expert Mary Jett Simpson asserts that the structure of rhyming books encourages children "to make predictions or guesses about words, phrases, sentences, events and characters that could come next in the story."
Gimmick Books
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Lift-a-flap books invite children to participate in the story. Books that make sounds and have movable parts fall into this category. The Child Development Institute notes that around the age of four, children start to prefer sex-appropriate activities, so tastes in such books are likely to vary between young boys and girls. Christina Parisi, executive editor at a New York-based publishing house and mother of a four-year-old boy, says, "He prefers I read gimmick books that make sounds of jets, for example. He likes anything that has to do with motion --- planes, cars, boats, helicopters, motorcycles."
Interactive Books
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Computers can make books a multimedia experience. Interactive books that have online, DVD, or downloadable components invite role-playing. They may also provide the learning advantages of having different characters use the same words in different ways, or having the word being spoken highlighted on the screen. Effective Teaching Solutions, a teacher-owned website, provides links to a number of sites that offer free interactive books online for pre-school and early school age children.
What-If Books
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Books that present unlikely situations make kids laugh. Louis the Fish became a popular title for four-year-olds when it was published in the late 1980s and continues to be appealing today. It engages kids with the tale of a butcher who loves fish---and he very happily becomes one. This kind of book that focuses on transformations of things that are physically improbable or impossible triggers imagination and also gets kids laughing. Reading with the child becomes a shared experience of both humor and dreams.
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