This is Part II in my monthly series of developing your child's language and learning.
Read to Your Child
Regardless of the age of your child reading him or her is a valuable activity. I even read to my daughter while she was in the womb. Everyone's listening vocabulary is well above their speaking, reading, or writing vocabulary. Reading to your child introduces them to new words, a variety of sentence structures, and concepts that they may not be exposed to in their daily lives.
Reading books also teaches them early literacy concepts such as book handling skills: holding the book right side up, turning the pages from left to right (front to back). If you use your fingers to follow the words as you read they begin to understand that print is read from left to right across the page and that you read from the top to the bottom of the page.
You can pause as you read to talk about the pictures on each page, let them identify the things they know by asking them "What this?" and tell them how smart they are, how proud you are of them. Identify the things they don't know by pointing to them and telling them the names, colors, or shapes of the objects. If you are reading a book about a farm and they can identify the chicken. Respond with, "Very good! That IS a chicken! What color is that chicken?" (yellow) "Yes, that is a yellow chicken."
By having simple conversations like this about what they see when you are reading to them you are helping build their vocabulary and revealing the identity new objects to them. You can also help them predict what is going to happen on each page if you talk about the picture before you read. This is fun to do even with very young infants. They'll enjoy the one-on-one time, the sound of your voice and the brightly colored pictures as much as they will enjoy learning.
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