What Makes Children Enjoy Reading and Rereading the Same Stories?

As parents, we often hear that it is beneficial to read stories to our children in the evening to enrich their vocabulary, strengthen their comprehension skills and build good family relationships. But experts don't know what's really going on in your home, and what your child really wants is to be read the same book every night, sometimes even several times in a row each night. So much so that you both know every phrase by heart.

[Article issu de The Conversation, écrit par Jane Herbert, Associate Professor in Developmental Psychology, University of Wollongong et Elisabeth Duursma, Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Literacy, University of Wollongong]

Given that young children remember the activities they carry out before sleeping particularly well, we can wonder whether these repetition effects are of interest from a learning point of view. And the answer is yes. While enjoying listening to the story, your children continue to discover many new things through the images, the text of the book and your discussions.

Children like repetition

Very young children are often found to prefer familiarity over novelty, this is a characteristic of the early learning stage. For example, they prefer faces of the same gender and ethnic group as the person who takes care of them on a day-to-day basis.

With age and experience, they will begin to seek out novelty. At four or five months, they find unfamiliar faces more interesting than the now so familiar face of their parent.

That said, if you repeatedly show him a photo of his mother, even a three-day-old baby will prefer to look at a new face. Once they have registered enough information from an image, infants are therefore ready for new experiences.

Your child's age affects how quickly he or she will learn and remember the readings you share. Two key principles of memory development are that younger children need more time to store information and they forget it more quickly.

This is how one-year-old children assimilate a sequence of new actions twice as quickly as six-month-old babies. And if children aged one and a half remember this sequence for 15 days, those aged two remember it for three weeks.

Two-dimensional sources of information, such as books and videos, are, however, more difficult for them to process than direct experiences. This is why renewed exposure helps them reap the benefits.

The varied vocabulary of fiction

Babies aged one and a half to two years who were told the same story four times reproduced the actions required to make a rattle much more accurately than those who had heard it twice. Likewise, by doubling the exposure to a video demonstration of toddlers – aged 12 to 21 months, we improve their memory of targeted actions.

Reading the same storybooks repeatedly also helps children learn new words, especially when they are between three and five years old.

Repetition facilitates the integration of complex information by giving the child more opportunities to record it, allowing them to focus on different aspects of an experience, while asking questions and connecting concepts together. through your discussions.

You may think that children's storybooks are simple, but they actually contain 50% more rare words than a prime-time television show or a student conversation. . Do you remember the last time you used the word “giraffe” while chatting with a colleague? Assimilating all these questions takes time.

These advantages of repetition being recognized in terms of learning, the technique has been integrated into the design of certain educational television programs. To reinforce his curriculum, the same episode of Blue's Clues (an American children's show) for example is rebroadcast every day for a week, while a coherent structure runs through all the episodes.

Watch the same episode five days in a row Blue's Clues allowed children aged three to five to better understand the content and increased their interactions. Through rehearsals, they learned to follow the structure of a television program and transfer their knowledge from one episode and series to another. This is the same process that is likely at play with rereading a story.

Exploit the richness of the story

The next time your child asks you to reread a well-known story, remember that this is an important step in their discovery of the world. You can take advantage of this familiar context to encourage other learning, focusing on something different with each new story.

One day, look more closely at the images, the next day, focus on the text or let your child find certain words from the text. Relate the story to real events in his children's world. This inclusion in a broader context is more stimulating and further sharpens children's cognitive skills.

You can also pick up on their interests by offering them books by the same author or covering similar subjects. Don't hesitate to offer them a wide variety of works, including documentaries that can give a better overview of a particular subject, while using other modes of storytelling and more technical vocabulary.

And remember that this period will not last. One day your child will have a new favorite book and the current one, love it or hate it, will return to their shelf.