Storytelling for Parents
Get better at storytime to grow your baby’s creativity, curiosity and intelligence
Raise a reader.
Parents who read to babies raise kids with stronger reading, spelling, and grammar skills that last well into their schooling years. That’s because parents provide babies with richer and deeper language when reading (as opposed to other activities like play). Those deceptively simple baby books help your baby understand the world around them earlier and better, and build complex language skills that stay with them for life.
Anyone can teach your toddler or preschooler reading skills like phonics and blending. But as parents, we have a profound effect on whether our children identify with reading. Babies who are read to become readers. Not simply children who can read, but who choose to read for pleasure.
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Free Baby Reading Resources
How do you capture and sustain the attention of your busy little one? What are some reading milestones to look out for? What makes a good storytime routine? Our free resources help you get started on this amazing journey to literacy with your baby.
Baby and Toddler Reading Milestones
Want to know how long baby can concentrate, or when baby can track your finger as you point to pictures? Our exclusive milestone guide helps you understand your baby’s milestones in the context of reading.
Baby Storytime Checklist
Welcome to the world! Our checklist helps you establish a solid storytime routine right from birth.
The 7 Types of Baby Books
Baby books are designed a little differently. From sensory features to lift-the-flaps, find out how you can get the most out of every baby book type.
Baby and Toddler Reading Milestones
Your busy toddler’s brain changes week on week, sometimes even daily! Check out our guide for the reading milestones you can look out for. Includes a bonus keepsake log for the memories!
Tips to Engage Your Busy Toddler
Your mobile toddler is now too busy to sit for more than 5 seconds. Does that mean storytime is over? No way! Find tips to engage your busy toddler in this blog post – so you can keep the stories and ditch the screens.
Books for Busy Tots
You want something that’s more interesting than Cocomelon, but less over-stimulating. Some books work better than others for babies on the move. Check out our recommendations at this blog post.
Pre-Reading Skills Checklist
Many parents skip key pre-reading skills, causing tears, frustration and reading refusal. Find out if your little one is really ready to read words using this checklist.
Letter Sound Game
So you’re all ready to read, but how do you start? Check out our letter sound game to make phonics fun.
Bilingual Reading Tips
Juggling a second language? Find out how you can introduce a second language through story at any age.
about me
I’m Sarah, a mum of 2, teacher by training and research nerd.
None of my years working with reluctant readers in their teens had prepared me to help my baby enjoy books. Despite my attempts at dramatic storytelling, my baby was still wrestling out of my arms and attempting to rip her books apart every storytime.
So in 2021, while juggling a full-time job, I turned to Google Scholar and did what I did best – read. Two years later, with the birth of our hard-of-hearing (HoH) son, I did the same and dove into research on the use of sign languages, gesture and language development in deaf/Deaf and HoH children.
Tiny Turns Page is a labour of love from our family to yours. We’re sharing over 3 years of our hands-on experience in applying the research on babies and early language development, so you don’t have to struggle like we did. Busy, distracted, sleepy, over-stimulated, seemingly unresponsive babies – we’ve seen them all and found ways to make storytime work despite it all.
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Storytelling at your fingertips.
We know parenting can be overwhelming – there’s a never-ending to-do list and everyone’s telling us we’re doing it all wrong. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt in our years of parenting, it’s that tiny changes add up.
So it’s not doomscrolling if you’re learning something. No, really. We document our ongoing experiments to apply the research on babies, brains and books to reading in our household. Including the successes and the failures. So you can learn from it all. And all in about a minute.
Follow us on Instagram and TikTok, and start making those tiny changes that count.
The Tiny Turns Page Difference
Designed for all babies and all families.
There are many perspectives on reading and early literacy:
But as a new mum juggling both work and parenting, I wanted:
Tiny Turns Page was built to fill the gap.
Child-led, responsive parenting
Look away if you want an approach that will get your child reading by X age. But because we emphasise intrinsic motivation, we’re confident that the stories we tell will have lasting effects on our children’s interest in books and reading.
Easy to implement
No one is busier than a parent or caregiver of very young babies. You need a practical strategy to improve storytime. We break down the elements of story into easy steps so you can focus on one thing at a time. All you need is 15 minutes a day. Let’s get your Tiny turning pages, one story at a time.
Inclusive, works in all languages
With my hard-of-hearing baby, I had to move away from a talk-heavy approach to make storytime accessible. I ended up developing a multi-sensory approach to reading which is perfect for multilingual families like ours, and can be applied to any language, spoken or signed.
Research-based
There are a lot of myths on how to engage your baby. Should you be keeping a running narration of everything? Should you deliberately slow down your voice, or use baby talk? Tiny Turns Page is my attempt to consolidate the research on these very questions that I had, in a bite-sized way for a general audience.
The Tiny Turns Page Difference
Designed for all babies and all families.
Your baby can read.
Not words, not yet. But your baby can hold a book the right way up. Turn pages. Pay attention to small details in images. Identify with characters. Anticipate plot twists. Follow a storyline.