Love You Forever

Amazon

My favorite book from my childhood is Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.  I remember reading it over and over as a child. My siblings and I loved snuggling up next to mom as she read to us in bed. Once we had read it enough to memorize it, mom and dad would sing the chorus to us as we were falling asleep. Now when I think about this book, I reflect back on the little melody my mom made up to the chorus:

I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living,
My baby you’ll be

One thing that I love about this book is the repetition and variation. KBYU Eleven created Ready To Learn parent workshops, and one of the lessons is called Learning Through the Early Years: The Benefits of Repetition and Variation. “Repetition is the mother of learning and is an essential key to the physical development of a child’s brain.” -KBYU Eleven Ready To Learn Curriculum.  The earlier we start reading with our children, the earlier they will learn some important skills in a variety of their development.

Here are some other books that involve repetition and variation:

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
The Big Red Barn
Goldilocks and the Three Bears

The Ready To Learn Curriculum includes some fun activities you can do at home!

A child’s language development is impacted by the words he hears - the more often he hears the words, the more likely he is to incorporate them into his vocabulary.  Repetition helps children to set expectations, when you’ve read a book several times together, the child will start to anticipate what comes next. This helps the child’s cognitive development and can carry over to bedtime routines, and later into school routines.

When a child is able to set expectations because of the repeated actions in a story, or in her daily routine, she is also more likely to be in control of her emotional development. She connects with the characters of the story, or anticipates the next step in her routine.

Many times, parents feel like each day is one big repetition! You have a typical routine and do the same things over and over each day, and these routines may become mundane. However, we are reminded that repetition has a variety of positive outcomes!

“Having ordinary routines and rituals, such as bedtime stories, Sunday dinners, birthday cakes, even chores, is linked to marital satisfaction, better children’s health and academic achievement, and more secure adolescents, according to an examination at Syracuse University of 50 years of data on family dynamics. Researchers there found that life’s little routines add up to a big security blanket, especially in times of stress. Boring is a blessing!”—Woman’s Day, February 2004