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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.

Fixing My Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Arrowsmit

Fixing My Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Arrowsmith Program (52:00) In her youth, Barbara Arrowsmith struggled with a severe learning dysfunction—until she designed a self-improvement regimen aimed at strengthening areas of her brain. This film profiles Arrowsmith, takes viewers inside the school she founded, and follows the progress of four cognitively challenged students enrolled there. Psychology and special education experts articulate diverging opinions of Arrowsmith’s methods—including enthusiasm from Dr. Norman Doidge of Columbia University and skepticism from Dr. Linda Siegel of the University of British Columbia. Displaying a wide range of attitudes among students and parents, the film culminates in a graduation ceremony—and measurable cognitive improvements. (52 minutes)

Arrowsmith School is a privately owned co-educational and non-denominational day school that is dedicated to helping students with learning disabilities.

Students who come to Arrowsmith School have been struggling in school - some are just starting their schooling but their experience has already shown a pattern of learning problems. Others have been finding school a challenge for years.

The cognitive exercise program at Arrowsmith School is designed to strengthen the learning capacities that underlie the learning difficulties that our students have been experiencing in school.

Teachers are the caretakers of the development of students’ highest brain during the years of its most extensive changes. As such, they have the privilege and opportunity to influence the quality and quantity of neuronal and connective pathways so all children leave school with their brains optimized for future success.

We now know that through neuroplasticity, interneuron connections (dendrites, synapses, and myelin coating) continue to be pruned or constructed in response to learning and experiences throughout our lives.

The prefrontal cortex

Our lab specializes in studying a region of the brain known as prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the cognitive abilities that depend on it, especially in young children.

Those abilities are often called executive functions and consist of cognitive control functions such as cognitive flexibility, inhibition (attentional control, self-control), working memory, reasoning, and problem-solving.

We have recently documented marked advances in executive functions due to an early childhood school curriculum (Tools of the Mind) that requires no specialists or expensive equipment, just regular teachers in regular classrooms.

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.

Dr. Allan Schore is on the clinical faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. He is author of four seminal volumes, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, and The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy, as well as numerous articles and chapters. His Regulation Theory, grounded in developmental neuroscience and developmental psychoanalysis, focuses on the origin, psychopathogenesis, and psychotherapeutic treatment of the early forming subjective implicit self.

Seth Pollak, PhD College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Professor of Anthropology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Public Affairs University of Wisconsin at Madison

approach research on child development from both basic science and applied, public health perspectives.

My particular area of interest is in understanding how the quantity and quality of early experiences in children's lives influences how children think about and process information.