Fiction? When is good to start?

"Chicken Licken : the sky is falling, we are going to tell the king! Henny Penny : I shall come too. We have Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, Goosey Loosey on their way to see the King".

"when the earth make 1 spin around the sun, it equates 1 day. To move 1 round around the sun it will take 365 days. At the furthest north pole is the Artic and furthest southpole is the Antartic. Only some animals can survive in the Artic and the Antartic like the polar bears, penguines, some species of seals"

It is easy to bring Chicken Licken to life, running together with Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, Goosey Loosey all the way to the king's castle. It is easy to captivate the child's attention and interest as children are able to imagine how a little chick looks like (a yellow feathery small blur eyed duckling look-alike bird). A small lil chick who goes running around yelling "The sky is falling" is easier and much more fun to be associated with compared to some talks about the earth, the sun and the orbit. Something moving around something, something making day and night. Even adults have difficulties understand these hard core facts. So how do we get our kid/s to be interested? When is a good time to talk and read to them about such?

I had started off with reading simple short stories to my son. Babies have shorter attention span compared to young toddlers, compared to slightly older toddlers. Once I see that my son is easily capitivated by books and stories and is able to hold short conversations, I see it as a good time to add on fiction to his list of books. And the trick to getting him interested in these fiction (hard facts) is to combine facts with a short stories for a start. Eg : The barosaurus dinosaur can measure up to 20+ mtrs in length. I held on to his hand to trace the outline of the dinosaur to make an impression of how long that might be. Following which, I talked about such a length means that the barosaurus is able to coil around and around lil boys and lil gals. They will ask how many rounds will that be, we could also use a fictatious number eg : 25 rounds for 25mtrs. This short story is able to captivate his interest in the barosaurus, being sooo very loooong. With the concept of the sun and the earth, I use an object (it could be any toy) and tell him, this is the sun...than using a ball, I make 1 spin while telling him this is 1 day. Using the same ball, I make the ball go 1 round around the sun. This I tell him takes 365 days/1 year. Thereafter, he is able to slightly understand the concept that the earth can spin and moves around the sun. At slightly past 2, he is still not able to understand the number of days and years concept. This I believe he will understand at an appropriate age.

Thus, the trick in introducing fiction, factual books to young readers is really to assist them in imagining what the facts is. Using objects and short stories will be 1 of the ways to help them along.