Picture books and reading aloud in early childhood services: pedagogical suggestions for inclusive educational design
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7347/EdL-01-2026-03Keywords:
reading aloud, early childhood education services, picturebook, inclusion, educational designAbstract
Recent research in the psycho-pedagogical and neuroscientific fields, in line with national and international regulations, highlights the importance of introducing children to storytelling, reading, and listening to stories from early childhood, emphasizing their multiple benefits for development and educational contexts. Within early childhood education services, the shared reading of picturebooks is configured as a pedagogical device capable of supporting cognitive, linguistic, affective, and relational development. The picturebook, as a visual-verbal artefact, represents a multimodal mediator that fosters the construction of the self, the relationship with others, and access to meaning even in the absence of consolidated verbal skills, thereby promoting inclusion and learning.
Reading aloud, supported by the use of picturebooks, can enhance creativity, different learning styles, and the development of divergent thinking, while facilitating linguistic enrichment and the stimulation of auditory, visual, and semantic brain areas, thus laying the foundations for the harmonious development of the person. On the basis of these premises, the present contribution aims to analyse the inclusive value of picturebooks in the 0-3 age range, with a specific focus on educational design centred on the languages of childhood, the accessibility of contexts, and the professional mediation of educators.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Michela Galdieri, Umberto Veneruso, Diana Carmela Di Gennaro
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