Read Along with Mum or Dad
If you have access to a cassette recorder, you can give your children cassette tapes of their favourite stories recorded by their favourite voice — yours!
Choose books that you and your children have enjoyed reading aloud together. In fact, you can record during your regular read- aloud sessions. Read slowly and with expression, pausing to give the children time to look at the pictures. Include turn-the-page signals in your recording, for example ‘Turn the page, Paul’. Mark the tape or cassette case with the full title of the book.
Present recordings on a rainy day when you want your children to amuse themselves, or leave them with a babysitter so that the children can listen to your familiar renditions when you can’t deliver them in person.
If you are giving a child a new book, wrap it up with a homemade read-along cassette that begins, ‘This is for Katie on her fourth birthday…’.