Most parents are well aware of the benefits of reading to children from a young age. However, what might surprise some is that picture books can play a significant role in fostering spatial awareness in children.
By choosing different types of books for your child’s library and reading schedule, you can help them develop many skills, spacial awareness being one of them. This is what you need to know about choosing and integrating picture books to foster spatial awareness in children, as well as some answers to frequently asked questions.
What is spatial awareness?
Before we delve into how picture books aid in developing spatial awareness, let’s first understand what the term means.
Spatial awareness is the ability to understand and interact with the environment around us. It’s a vital cognitive skill that children use to grasp concepts like distance, size, movement and the relationship between objects.
From the moment we open our eyes for the first time, we can recognise moving objects around us. As we grow and our brains develop, we start to want to reach for items. Around 12 to 24 months, we start to understand how objects fit together, which develops further into toddlerhood and beyond.
Picture books are one of the ways we can help develop spatial awareness in children.
Picture Books & Visual Learning
Picture books are more than just colourful images and engaging stories — they provide a visual platform for children to explore the world around them. The illustrations in picture books often depict different spatial concepts like ‘above and below’, ‘near and far’, ‘inside and outside’. As children engage with these stories, they subconsciously begin to understand and apply these concepts, fostering their spatial awareness.
Encouraging Active Engagement
As parents, you can further enhance this learning by actively engaging your child in the story. Ask questions about the locations of characters or objects in the story, encouraging your child to use spatial language in their responses.
Busy books are a type of book specifically designed to foster spatial awareness in children.
From tracing numbers and letters, moving objects and other activities, busy books help kids learn different elements of spatial awareness in an engaging and fun way. They can also be used from as young as 18 months old, helping to develop different skills at different ages.
Choosing the Right Picture Books
While any picture book can aid in spatial learning, some are more effective than others. Books with detailed illustrations, varied environments, and those that explicitly deal with spatial concepts can be especially beneficial.
One Response
Can’t thankyou enough for this brilliant idea. We have the whole collection and my 7 & 5 year old absolutely love them; using them over and over again consistently.