Babies

Babies are born ready to learn. From the earliest days of a child’s life, parents can make a lasting impression on their child’s future learning success. From birth to two, critical language development occurs in the brain. During these early years of life, a baby’s brain actively absorbs the language around them. By surrounding babies with a world of rich language stimulation, parents prepare their infant’s brain for future learning.

The best news for parents is that some of the best things they can do with their infant to prepare them for reading and learning success are also the most fun and natural. Talk, sing and read to your baby. Babies will begin to respond by listening, looking and smiling as early as six weeks old.

Love Books (Print Motivation): Hold your baby close and give lots of hugs and positive words while reading books. Your baby will come to associate reading with warmth and love.

Use Books (Print Awareness): Babies treat books as they would any other toy, which means putting them in their mouths, pushing, pulling and sometimes tearing. Allow babies to explore books so they how they learn to handle them.

See Letters (Letter Knowledge): Babies learn through their senses. Touching, smelling and tasting are as important as hearing and seeing. Give them opportunities to feel different textures and shapes. What feels the same, what feels different?  This helps them later when they are trying to figure out what is the same and different among the shapes of letters.

Tell a Story (Narrative Skills): Stories have a certain structure, with a beginning, a middle and an end. By exposing babies to storybooks, you help them become familiar with the way language flows.

Make Sounds (Phonological Awareness): Singing is fun! Don't worry if you don't have perfect pitch! In songs, each syllable has a different note. Without even thinking about it, children are hearing words being broken down into parts. This helps them later on when they have to sound out words.

New Words (Vocabulary): One way you can help increase your child’s vocabulary is by “narrating your day,” or saying what you are doing while you are doing it. By doing this, you are exposing your child to a variety of language.

For more information visit  Every Child Ready to Read @ Your Library