How to choose a story book for a 4-year-old

Somewhere around four, children shift from enjoying a book as a series of pictures to following it as a story. They start to care what happens next, notice when a character is sad or sneaky, and ask why. That opens up a much wider range of books than at two or three.

Most four-year-olds cannot yet read the words themselves, so a book has to work when it is read aloud. The language should sound good in your voice, and the pictures should let a child follow along without you explaining every page.

They also have strong opinions. A four-year-old who calls a book boring usually means it is too long, too wordy or has nothing funny in it — all useful clues for the next choice.

Most good picture books for this age have somewhere between 300 and 800 words and take about four to eight minutes to read aloud. Books much longer than that tend to lose a four-year-old halfway through, however good they are.

Read a page aloud before you choose. If you stumble over it, your child will drift. Look for short sentences, a few new words that the pictures help explain, and rhythm or repetition that makes the book easy to read with expression.

Don't avoid every hard word. Four-year-olds pick up vocabulary fastest from books, because stories use words that rarely come up in everyday talk. One or two unfamiliar words a page is fine when the picture helps.

A good story for this age has one main character, a problem a child can understand — something lost, someone left out, a rule broken — and an ending where the problem is solved. Several subplots or a long middle are hard to keep track of at four.

The best characters are children or animals in situations your child recognises: making friends, feeling scared, getting into trouble, being the smallest. They let a child try out a feeling safely, through someone else.

Humour counts for a lot. Something silly, like a hat that lands on a sleeping seal or a pet who causes chaos, keeps a four-year-old engaged and makes them ask for the book again, and rereading is where most of the learning happens.

Turn the pages without reading the words. If you can follow the story from the pictures alone, a four-year-old can too, and that is what keeps them with you while you read.

Look for faces that show feelings clearly. Pointing at a character and asking 'how do you think she feels?' is one of the most valuable things you can do with a picture book, and it needs illustrations that make feelings easy to see.

Watch for clutter. Busy pages full of small details are great for daytime look-and-find books but tiring at bedtime, when a clear picture of what is happening is much easier to follow.

Keep a mix on the shelf: a funny book for the afternoon, a calm one for bedtime, an information book about whatever they are obsessed with this month — dinosaurs, diggers, sharks — and a few books that gently deal with something real, such as starting school, a new baby or being brave.

Books about a particular worry work best before the event rather than during it. Reading about the first day at school a few weeks early lets a child rehearse the feeling while it is still at a distance.

Above all, let your child choose some of the time. A book they picked, even one you would never have chosen, is a book they will want to hear, and wanting to hear stories is the habit that matters most.