Reading to your children is one of the most recommended activities you can do with your little one. Research has shown that reading to children has great benefits. According to Early Moments, reading to children brings about:

•  A stronger relationship with you.
• Academic excellence.
• Basic speech skills.
• The basics of how to read a book.
• Better communication skills.
• Mastery of language.
• More logical thinking skills.
• Acclimation to new experiences.
• Enhanced concentration and discipline.
• The knowledge that reading is fun!

Goodnight Moon has been called ‘Perhaps the perfect children’s bedtime book’ by Amazon

Many children books can be found on the market and these books are mainly picture books with few words. Said books have been embraced by parents and children alike. However, a research done by the University of Sussex notes that while publishers look to produce ever more colourful and exciting texts to entice buyers, psychologists have shown that having more than one illustration per page results in poorer word learning among pre-schoolers.

The psychologists concluded that having fewer illustrations leads to better word learning. They found that children who were read stories with only one illustration at a time learned twice as many words as children who were read stories with two or more illustrations.

Doctoral researcher and co-author Zoe Flack said:

“Luckily, children like hearing stories, and adults like reading them to children. But children who are too young to read themselves don’t know where to look because they are not following the text. This has a dramatic impact on how well they learn new words from stories.”

If, out of the many reasons of reading to children, yours is for them to learn words then this is for you. For illustrations in children’s books, less is more.