Another thing I don't understand is when people talk about listening to books and attention span in children. My child will listen to books for as long as I'll read to her but I don't see how that is the same as having a long attention span when we are looking at a lot of different books so the focus of her attention is changing regularly throughout the hour. If we were in a toy store for an hour playing with each toy for 5-10 minutes I wouldn't say her attention span for toys was an hour so why should books be *counted* differently? I know it doesn't matter, I'm just trying to understand what people are talking about when they talk about attention span.
For us, it would be about 5-10 minutes per book in sets of 6-10 several times throughout the day. So we're on the same page (ha).
I would argue that reading is about more than just processing different storylines, especially with dialogic reading. There's a dance of social reciprocity between the reader and listener, basically a text-linked conversation, that remains continuous across books. Playing with different toys at a store might also be considered one continuous activity if the child is using an informal sort of scientific method to study each toy similarly in sequence. It really comes down to trying to understand what the child is perceiving which, I'm learning, is often different from what adults view at face value.
To my unresearched mind, attention span isn't so much about doing any one activity for a fixed period of time so much as engaging in a fluid thought process or manner of thinking. But that's just my opinion.
