The post Exposing Children to Books From Other Cultures appeared first on Moontales Publishing UK Ltd..
Some children are avid readers, burning through books both at school and at home. But even the biggest book-loving kids are often exposed only to books from within their own culture and perhaps from some relatively similar cultures like USA.
There are a number of reasons that it might be a good idea to encourage children to read books from other cultures, whether translated children’s literature from other European countries, folktales from the many countries of Africa, or traditional stories from Asian nations.
Broader Cultural Awareness: Reading literature from other cultures will help to increase a child’s understanding of that culture. This will give them a much broader sense of cultural awareness and greater sense of the different types of people they are likely to meet in the world. Exposing children to stories from other cultures such as African folktales will encourage tolerance and inclusiveness, and help them get on well with all kinds of people from a range of backgrounds in the future. It will also help them to develop an idea of what other cultures are like and what traditions they have, which could be useful if they choose to travel in the future, do business with people from other cultures, or simply meet some foreign friends.
Fire Their Imaginations: Reading is well-recognised as a way to fire a child’s imagination and encourage them to be creative. However, if you only expose a child to literature from a particular culture, this may have a limiting effect. Encouraging children to read books from other cultures will open them up to a whole new world of themes and ideas, and a much wider range of literary traditions, genres and styles. The result is a much broader variety of stimuli for their imaginations. If children want to exercise their creativity and come up with their own ideas, they will have a much bigger selection of concepts and influences to draw from.
Fascinating Literature: Another, much simpler reason to encourage children to read books, stories and literature from other cultures is simply that it provides a huge pool of fascinating and entertaining tales to draw from. For most children, this massive pool remains completely untapped. Sources of literature such as African folktales and other traditional tales from around the world are rich varied, well-told and have often been refined over centuries. Any child who loves reading will find plenty of fine literature among the stories of other cultures and are unlikely to enjoy them any less because they come from further afield than the books they usually read. In fact, they may well enjoy reading books from other cultures more. When an avid reader bookworm has read a huge range of English and American literature by the time they hit their teenage years, expanding their reading list into other cultures might be one of the few ways to find something new, exciting, and truly different from anything they have read before.
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The post Exposing Children to Books From Other Cultures appeared first on Moontales Publishing UK Ltd..