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What is book sharing?

Book sharing is an interactive way for parents and children to explore books together. It involves parents following their child’s interest, and labelling and talking about book content that catches their child’s attention. Book sharing supports the important interactions between babies, young children, and their parents and caregivers, which are vital for early development. Research has shown that book sharing has lots of benefits for children’s language development, cognitive skills and relationships with their parents or caregivers.

As part of PEDAL’s Playtime with Books project, we created two videos for our YouTube channel that explain what book sharing is, how to do it, how it benefits children and what it might look like.

This first video was created with early years practitioners in mind. We hope you find the advice in this video useful and are inspired to support and encourage the families that you work with to try book sharing with their little ones.

We also created a video for parents and caregivers which we’d love for you to share with the families that you work with:

You can learn more about the Playtime With Books programme here and here.