The changing restrictions of our new coronavirus ‘normal’ makes it an ideal time to reflect on how picturebooks can help us not only to establish, embed and revise rules and routines in our setting but also to ensure that children understand the reasoning behind them.
WITH GOOD REASON
In a 2013 paper exploring ‘the fundamental relatedness of picturebooks to the cognitive development of children’, researchers Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer describe storytime as a process that ‘stimulates minidialogues between children and adults, thus improving and extending children’s conversational and narrative skills’.
For very young children entering new settings beyond the home for the first time, making friends, learning to respond to new rules and routines, and responding to new, pro-social modes of behaviour and communication, can be a bewildering and confusing situation. Providing space to talk about, think through, question and understand the reasons why we need to behave in new, strange ways and follow shared rules is an important way to ease the transition from home to early years setting or Reception classrooms.
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