BrainFood Learning

It’s exciting to witness Parker’s reading development!  He’s not quite three years old and reading!  He calls out words like bank, zoo, east, and west while in the car.  He reads sections of his books to us and his younger brother.  He identifies words in the books that my husband and I read.  Although he surprises us every day with what he can read, I think we gave him, and continue to give him, an environment that has facilitated his skill development.

The U.S. Department of Education lists various activities to do with your children to encourage literacy development and I was pleased to see that we already do quite a bit of what they suggest. We have read to Parker from day one and surround him with a literate rich environment.  Children’s books, adult fiction and nonfiction, magazines, letter magnets, and foam letters in the bath fill our home.  We point out and talk about signs in the community.  Parker loves to be read to from both his books and ours.  Frequently, he asks us to read out loud from the books we are reading.  We read to him while he’s in the bath. In fact, he’s chosen to listen to the first two Harry Potter books and

the Narnia series.  Looking through magazines with Parker from an early age has been fun because we use them for vocabulary building.  We’d either point to a picture or ask him to name it, or we’d ask him to point to a particular picture.  It was so fun and rewarding to see that adorable smile on his face when he knew he was correct. Parker loves to sing the Alphabet Song and we play with how fast or slow we sing it.  He thinks it so funny to hear Mommy sing the ABC’s as fast as she can.  One game he likes to play is where one of us chooses a letter and then we take turns naming words that start with that letter.  The list goes on and on.

The idea is to continuously play with words and sounds and encourage our children to play along.  Show them how important reading is.  Not just from books, but in all elements of our lives.  Help instill the love of reading and get them hooked at an early age, and there’s no telling where their skills will lead them.

Talk, talk, talk.  Sometimes I feel as though I’m talking to myself.  I remind myself that talking to my young children really is to their benefit, even though Brandon (age 13 months) may not respond much with his own words.  My husband and I use everyday language and vocabulary without watering it down, and we expose them to different perspectives and ideas.  It’s important to let the kids hear my husband and I have conversations, too, to learn the social aspect of conversation.  Betty Hart and Todd Risley conducted a longitudinal study looking at how much kids were talked to in the very early years and their vocabulary development and future academic success.  The results were impressive.  From their website, http://www.lenababy.com/Study.aspx:

“With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age three and later.”

“The data revealed that the most important aspect of children’s language experience is its amount.”

“Differences in the amount of cumulative experience children had … were strongly linked to differences at age three in children’s rates of vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and general accomplishments and strongly linked to differences in school performance at age nine.”

The gist is this, as Peg Tyre wrote in The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve, “The more children are spoken to, the more they themselves speak.  And the more they speak, the greater their vocabularies.  The greater their vocabularies, the better their reading fluency and reading comprehension is likely to be.”  I see this abundance of vocabulary and impressive reading skill in my almost three year old, Parker.  He speaks in complex sentences, uses advanced vocabulary, and shares amazing, imaginative ideas.  I attribute this to the constant conversation he has with the people around him and being read to from not only the children’s books that he enjoys, but also from our higher level texts that we read aloud.

So talk to your children.  Talk a lot. Talk out loud while you’re at the grocery store, post office, or in the car.  Point out what you see and describe it.  Ask your children questions.  Help them develop answers, if necessary.  Engage your children in conversation on a regular basis.  Your child’s increased intelligence and later success may depend on it.