7 Must-Have Baby Books for Girls

Posted on | by KD Novelties

baby books for girls

If there’s going to be a new little girl in your life, baby books for girls are the ideal gift! Reading to children should begin at birth to instill a love of books and to help infants and children develop vocabulary skills.

The books you read to baby will draw smiles, giggles, and maybe even a few claps, pats, and gleeful bounces. And the best baby books for girls encourage her natural exploratory instincts as well as allowing her to be introduced to new characters, words, shapes, and colors.

Books should engage her curiosity, delight her, and make mom and dad happy, too! But baby books for girls go beyond cute, cuddly, and colorful and expand into interactive masterpieces to help her utilize all her senses.

Looking for a few good baby books for girls? Check out these fantastic titles!

1.    Baby Faces by Amy Pixton and Kate Merritt.

She will love looking at all the fun faces of these cutely drawn babies! Parents can imitate the expressions and encourage baby to imitate them, too! The best part of this book, though, is that she can chew on it without worry—Baby Faces is one of the titles in the Indestructible book lines. The board books are durable and, yes, nontoxic and washable.

2.    Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt

This is a must-have book for all babies! Pat the Bunny encourages babies to touch and pet the cute white bunny. She will love exploring the furry textures and the adorable bunny found on every page!

3.    Touch and Feel Trucks by DK

Little girls shouldn’t be limited to pink and princesses, and this touch and feel book features awesome trucks that girls and boys might see every day. The textures are unique and encourage her to explore every page. She can even spin the cement mixer!

baby books for girls

4.    The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

This cute little caterpillar is also a baby book staple! Eric Carle’s illustrations are bright, bold, and oh so happy! She will love watching the little caterpillar eat through fruit, cake, and much more. Help her learn colors and numbers as you work through the book…and then watch as the little caterpillar turns into a bright beautiful butterfly!

5.    Any Personalized Books

A personalized book makes her a character in the story. She will love hearing her name and seeing her little face as you read through a personalized adventure. And with KD Novelties, they can go on adventures with characters from Sesame Street, Pocahontas, and even Scooby Doo and Garfield.

6.    Spots and Dots (Art Baby) by Chez Picthall

This book will draw her attention with high contrast images, as the book was created for babies aged 6 weeks to 6 months and is artistically designed to engage her visually. While wordless, the pictures have a way of speaking for themselves!

7.    Pop Art Baby by Mudpuppy and Keith Haring

Bold, colorful pop art designs are combined with words that are translated into four languages: English, French, Spanish, and German. Teach her about colors and other languages as she also explores all the bright and happy art.

Use books to help her explore the world and her senses. Baby books for girls should capture their imagination and provide a means to delight their natural curiosity. Introduce her mind to bold artwork, sweet images, interactive textures, and even personalized storylines. Books are a baby’s first glimpse at the wonder and possibilities all around them, so give the gift of a book today!

5 Tips For Helping Kids Learn Language Through Reading

Posted on | by KD Novelties

If you’re here you probably know by now that reading to your child and encouraging an early love of reading can set up them up for success later in life. Reading can help kids build crucial critical thinking skills, become more active and successful in social environments, and help them develop an early and more advanced understanding of language.

Reading to your child is nearly as important as just speaking to your child and engaging in daily interaction — it helps them begin to learn the sounds and shapes of letters and words, as well as get used to more complex aspects of language, such as sentence structure and vocabulary. And once your child is old enough to read, they can begin to develop their own language skills alongside you.

Here are 5 tricks to help your kids learn language through reading.

1- Read Stories Aloud to Them

Reading aloud to your child is the first crucial step in helping them develop. By regularly sharing stories with them, you will help them build their own language skills — from learning to recognize words and letters to how to sound out language own their own. When children listen to you read, they reinforce the sounds that are the basic building blocks of language. It will also help them learn more vocabulary, critical thinking skills, and essential communication skills.

2- Have Them Read Aloud to You

Once your child is old enough to begin to read themselves, have them read books aloud to you. It will help them with the more challenging aspects of language development. Reading aloud is a great way to learn to sound out words and recognize new vocabulary you’ve never encountered before. It also helps build crucial communication skills by allowing your child to develop speech patterns and recognize sentence structure as they work to process spelling, punctuation, phonetics, and more.

3- Have Them Describe Pictures to You

If your child is too young to read a book aloud to you, you can still help them develop their language skills by encouraging pretend reading, when a child pages through a book without actually reading it. It’s a sign of pre-literacy and shows that they’re beginning to grasp modes of language and reading/writing. Once they have a bit of a grasp on language, have them describe the pictures in a book to you.

By describing the story through what they see, they’re learning to think critically about the world they encounter and translate it into words, language, and a comprehensible story format. They will be better poised to sound out words and develop reading skills if they’re already shaping language skills through identifying storytelling via images.

4- Discuss the Story After

An essential part of reading to your child is not only reading to them, but discussing the storytelling with them after. Ask them to recount the story to you or to discuss specific scenarios. Probe their understanding of what they read, and help them understand cause and effect, logical reasoning, and critical thinking through discussing the events of the books you read.

Even if it’s a simple picture book, asking your child to explain relationships between characters or why the protagonist makes a certain choice or what happens when they make that choice will help them develop key language skills. It will also form the basis for communication and thinking patterns that are essential in all modes of formal education.

5-  Have them Relate the Story to Their Own Lives

Lastly, when you’re reading to your child, explain to them or have them tell you how a story and its circumstances relates to their own lives. For one, they can find a familiarity of experience in books that will help ease their mind if they’re feeling anxious or alone in certain circumstances. It will also help teach them empathy, as they learn to draw parallels between their lives and the stories of others. Lastly, it will help them build key emotional language skills — if they must relate to and describe the emotional circumstances of fictional characters, then they will learn how to express their own emotions and feelings using words and language as well. It helps them learn healthy habits about expressing themselves from a young age. And if you really want to help them relate to the story, consider buying a personalized book that features them as the main character!

Reading is an essential part of developing your child’s language skills, so use these 5 tips to help them thrive.

Whether to Homeschool or Not?

Posted on | by KD Novelties

Homeschooling has become more mainstream in recent years, but it is still a rare thing in today’s world. As education becomes more widely available to people from all walks of life, homeschooling is still a thought on many parents’ minds. There are many reasons why parents and caregivers may choose to go the homeschooling route, but there are certain things that you need to keep in mind if you are thinking of doing the same for your children.

Define Your Priorities

For many parents, it is their ideology that drives them to consider homeschooling. If there is a particular set of ideas and values that you would like to impart to your child that they may not receive in another setting, then this is the first thing you have to do. Not only will it help you ultimately make a decision but it can also help shape the way you approach homeschooling if you go down that route.

Know Who You Are

In the same vein as above, it helps for parents and guardians to figure out who they are and what their approach to homeschool is. There are a lot of stereotypes out there, but ultimately you are your own person and your approach to homeschooling will be entirely your own. Knowing what your goals are and what your approach will be can help you make a decision, however, it will have a huge impact on how you go about educating your children as well.

Get Acquainted with Curriculum

Even though you will have more control over what your child learns and how they go about doing so, learning more about curriculum styles and requirements can provide you with guidelines when it comes time to creating your own curriculum for your child. Give yourself some homework and read up on the educational philosophies of homeschooling. Certain ideas and approaches may jump out at you and resonate with your thoughts on homeschooling and why you want to consider it in the first place.

Define Your Time

As a homeschooler, you will need to dedicate a lot of your own time to educating your child, but there are other types of time you may need to allocate as well. For many kids, school is more than just about education but it is also about activity and socialization. It is important that parents take these important types of developmental time into consideration before making a tentative schedule of your own. Will you be able to handle scheduling learning time with these other activities? Doing so can help your child become more well-rounded and aid them when it comes to developing key physical and social skills, so it is vital to keep these other types of learning in mind.

How Will You Support It?

This is perhaps a more pertinent question for parents choosing homeschooling over public schooling, but in any case, homeschooling is a full time job. It demands time, supplies, and resources, too. Parents who might otherwise send their child to private school can allocate those designated funds to support homeschooling, but since public school does not require tuition, the time and effort put into it will need to come from somewhere.

There are many things that parents need to consider before homeschooling. For some, it is a personal choice whereas for other parents, kids with special needs (whether they be related to medical requirements and limitations or learning and behavioral disabilities) or with special circumstances may get the most out of homeschooling because of their needs or because of accessibility. There are plenty of resources for parents to check out, and sometimes medical professionals can offer advice if the choice to homeschool is related to a child’s medical or behavioral needs. Reach out to others, gather differing opinions and ideas, and try to make an educated decision before taking the leap.