Talk to your Baby

Literacy-rich home environments are the key to children becoming readers. They contribute more to a child’s early literacy development than do kindergarten or pre-school. How can I create a home environment that is literacy rich?

The first step is to talk to your baby. Who would think that talking to your child creates intelligence? Talk to your baby even before your child is born. Children learn vocabulary and communication by hearing their language spoken to them. Hart and Ridley (1995, 1999) estimated that “within a year’s time period, children from professional homes are exposed to 11.2 million words, children from working-class homes are exposed to 6.5 million words, and children from welfare homes are exposed to 3.2 million words.” Vocabulary development is essential to literacy. We can bridge that gap by talking to our children. Turn off the T.V. Turn off devices in the car. Talk to your children while you are making dinner, making the bed, having a bath. Tell them anything you can think of. The more you speak from the beginning or his/her life, the better for his/her growth and development. “Studies have shown that language skills—and even your intelligence—are related to how many words an infant hears each day. In one study, babies whose parents spoke to them a lot (an average of 2,100 words an hour) scored higher on standard tests when they reached age 3 than did children whose parents hadn’t been as verbal.” (www.babycenter.com/0_reading-to-your-baby)

By the time your child reaches his/her first birthday, he will have learned all the sounds needed to speak his native tongue. Children whose parents frequently talk/read to them know more words by age two than children who have not been talk/read to, so talk, talk, talk. Children who are talk/read to will be ready and willing to learn to read at the right time.