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David McGavock

Baby/Toddler Reading: What Neuroscientists and Parents Need to Know | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • experts seem to think that baby/toddler reading and learning to read in school are the same. They aren't. Of course babies and toddlers don't have the brain development to learn to read like a 6-year-old. Early literacy experts have come to understand that babies and toddlers learn to read differently.
  • Although no one can explain exactly how baby/toddler reading works, babies do have capacities from birth to age 3 for picking up reading–including phonics patterns and decoding–similar to their capacities for picking up languages.
  • hese events require intimate physical contact such as snuggling with a book or cuddling with the baby or toddler at the computer.
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  • The interview with Wang, a neuroscientist, along with one of his coauthors, Dr. Sandra Aamodt, celebrates the release of their new book, Welcome to Your Child's Brain, which synthesizes research on how the brain develops from infancy to adolescence and provides scores of tips for parents. The interview and a report on NPR's web site, "How to Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong," are chock full of great advice that dovetails with best practices for baby/toddler reading:
  • • Don't use force.• Realize that children reach cognitive milestones at different times.• Expect babies' brains to do very complicated things. • Take advantage of the baby's special language capacities.• Capitalize on babies' attraction to language. • Use active and social exposure to words.• Encourage bilingual learning in babyhood.• Teach self-control.• Take advantage of your child's natural sense of fun.
  • "The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot" and "Respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn't forming the words correctly or you don't understand it.
  • add reading aloud and talking about the story to increase the number and quality of word data going into the baby/toddler brain in the first three years of life.
  • most of all, add book sharing and word games, because the attention and fun with words and books are a wonderful vehicle for physical contact and bonding.
  • About 1 in 5 children struggle with phonemic awareness and other disabling issues, so dismissing reading as something that seems as simple as telling "the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on" and saying that "it's something that older children can do without any effort at all," is oversimplification.
  • Many babies learn to read some words before they can speak them.
  • Children have to think in words before they can read them. But they don't necessarily have to speak them before they can read.
  • Teaching your baby or toddler to read joyfully and informally is easier than teaching a child to read formally at age 6.
  • Teach your baby/toddler to read and bring loving physical contact, language, thinking, feelings, bonding, creativity and expression into one simple act. There may be no better way to help your child's brain grow up strong than to teach your child to read joyfully.
David McGavock

UW research on brain activity delivers lessons on how kids learn | Local News | The Sea... - 0 views

  • she has found, in work that is not yet published, that the ability of 6-month-olds to tune in to the sounds of their native language — like the subtle difference between “pat” and “bat” — predicts a skill at age 5 that corresponds strongly with reading success.
  • parents strengthen those connections as their children grow by reading aloud to them, asking open-ended questions, and practicing serve-and-return conversations that build vocabulary and basic knowledge about the world around them.
  • two dimensions of attention — locking in on what’s important while ignoring distractions — predicted both how well they would speak at age 2½ as well as their phonological awareness at age 5.
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  • Children who have even one adult spending time with them like that can form those connections, regardless of family wealth and education,
  • preschool should be about practicing all the ways that the brain experiences language — hearing it, speaking it, seeing it and writing it
  • Preschool also should provide “lots of opportunities to play, explore, listen to stories, look at the pictures and written words, and talk about what they hear,” Berninger said.
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    "Those two dimensions of attention - locking in on what's important while ignoring distractions - predicted both how well they would speak at age 2½ as well as their phonological awareness at age 5. Parents direct their babies' attention to what's important with lots of warm, loving, face-to-face talk using that kind of singsong voice that dips and rises and stretches out vowel sounds. And parents strengthen those connections as their children grow by reading aloud to them, asking open-ended questions, and practicing serve-and-return conversations that build vocabulary and basic knowledge about the world around them. Children who have even one adult spending time with them like that can form those connections, regardless of family wealth and education, Kuhl said."
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