It is never too soon to teach your child to love reading and books
World Book Day is celebrated on April 23 to promote reading, publishing and copyright.
POLOKWANE – World Book Day is celebrated on April 23 to promote reading, publishing and copyright.
This event is coordinated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
Magriet Lotz, senior librarian at the Polo-kwane City Library, understands the importance of encouraging children to read.
Lotz, who has been working in libraries for almost 40 years now, says libraries play a very important role in the development of children’s exposure to reading and to books.
She says libraries have a wide range of children’s books available and is the ideal environment to help any child fall in love with reading.
She says it is a parent’s duty to encourage children to take up reading.
“Parents should guide their children to read books, especially in this fast-paced world we live in with all its electronic gadgets that could so easily capture the attention of today’s child,” she says.
According to Lotz, the Polokwane City Library ensures that they cater for most of Limpopo’s languages and offers a great selection of books in Northern Sotho and Venda as well as many other languages.
She says during the first five years of a child’s life, the brain develops at its quickest. This is the ideal time for parents to expose their children to books, because a love for reading and books could help the child’s intellectual and emotional development for the rest of that child’s life.
“Here at the library we have books that cater for all development phases in a child’s life. No child should miss out on any of these phases as they grow up. We cater for the pre-school years too. It is never too early to expose a child to books. We have a wide range of cardboard baby books that will mesmerise and keep babies occupied,” Lotz says.
She says the current trend is books that are written with today’s modern child in mind. A lot of thinking has also gone into the layout, design and printing of the latest generation children’s story books, she says.
“After all is said and done, the closest place to heaven is a library,” she says.
