Collection Spotlight: Read to Me Bags

Our Read to Me Bags are for babies and toddlers! (Although they appeal to older children too.) 

They are created around a theme and contain 2 board books, 1 music cd, 1 puppet and nursery rhymes. 

"Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly." Mem Fox, Reading Magic.

Some of our Read to Me Bag subjects:

Colors       Bedtime       Numbers    Puppies  ABC's   At the Zoo      Silly Time 

        Playtime     Things that go           Baby Faces     Potty Training   Bath Time 

   Animals    Noisy Fun     Holidays: Halloween, Easter and more  Seasons: Fall, Summer 

               Getting ready for a baby     Dinosaurs      Mo Willems Pigeon and many more! 

How can a puppet help your child's development? Learning through play is fundamental to our children's education, helping them to develop the necessary skills in life. Puppets can stimulate children's imagination, encourage creative play and discovery and are a wonderful interactive way to introduce narrative to even the most reluctant reader. They can be a powerful way of bringing story time to life; puppets can provide a focus for role play, encouraging the child's imagination and involvement in activities and can play a fundamental part in the recitation of stories and verse. In addition, hand puppets with workable mouths and tongues are an excellent motivational resource to inspire the teaching of phonics within literacy. {The Creativity Institute website http://www.creativityinstitute.com/puppetsineducation.aspx - accessed 8/19/14}

How does music help your child's development? {The Benefits of Music Education by Brown. http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music-arts/the-benefits-of-music-education/  Accessed 8/19/14}

•  Research has found that learning music facilitates learning other subjects and enhances skills that children inevitably use in other areas. While children come into the world ready to decode sounds and words, music education helps enhance those natural abilities. “Growing up in a musically rich environment is often advantageous for children’s language development,” Luehrisen says.
•  “There’s some good neuroscience research that children involved in music have larger growth of neural activity than people not in music training. When you’re a musician and you’re playing an instrument, you have to be using more of your brain,” says Dr. Eric Rasmussen, chair of the Early Childhood Music Department at the Peabody Preparatory of The Johns Hopkins University,
• Research has also found a causal link between music and spatial intelligence, which means that understanding music can help children visualize various elements that should go together, like they would do when solving a math problem.

How do Nursery Rhymes help your child's development? 

Here are four main reasons nursery rhymes can be beneficial for kids:

1. They are good for the brain. Not only does the repetition of rhymes and stories teach children how language works, it also builds memory capabilities that can be applied to all sorts of activities. Furthermore, as Vandergrift points out, nursery rhyme books are often a child’s first experience with literacy: "Even before they can read, children can sit and learn how a book works." This extends to the pictures and music associated with nursery rhymes: it is a full visual and oral experience.
2. Nursery rhymes preserve a culture that spans generations, providing something in common among parents, grandparents and kids—and also between people who do not know each other. Seth Lerer, Humanities Professor at the University of California San Diego and expert in the history of children’s literature, says that reading nursery rhymes to kids is, in part, "to participate in a long tradition … it’s a shared ritual, there’s almost a religious quality to it."
3. They are a great group activity. Susie Tallman, who has put out several award-winning nursery rhymes CDs, and is also a nursery school music teacher, describes how singing nursery rhymes allows all kids—even shy ones—to feel confident about singing, dancing and performing because they are so easy to grasp and fun: "It builds confidence right in front of my eyes," she says. "They really see the connection between movement, rhythm and words." She has also had kids of different ages collaborate on making music videos for their favorite nursery rhymes.
4. Most important is that they are fun to say. Lerer downplays the life lessons that some rhymes contain, arguing that while parents might consider them important, children probably do not register them. He remembers how as a kid he had no idea what "Peas porridge hot/peas porridge cold" meant but that "he just loved the way it sounded." One should not let any supposed deeper meanings or origins to nursery rhymes obscure their true value: the joy of a child’s discovery of an old, shared language. {From PBS Parents- The Surprising Meaning and Benefits of Nursery Rhymes By Michael Sizer.  http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/reading-language/reading-tips/the-surprising-meaning-and-benefits-of-nursery-rhymes/  Accesses 8/20/14}

Cathy