Reading To Your Child

Reading To Your Child

One of the best things you can do for your child is to read to them.  Right from the first weeks of life, every day if possible, reading to your child has huge benefits.

In the first month or two the baby will not understand any of the words you are saying but he will begin to recognise patterns in the way you read and the words will be embedded in his memory ready to be matched with a meaning in future months and years.

Reading to a young baby is very calming for a baby who keeps crying for no apparent reason. The sound of ريدينغ , especially poetry or nursery rhymes can even send a baby to sleep! It is a strategy worth trying by an exasperated parent faced with a baby who keeps on crying and you feel you've tried everything else..

As babies grow into toddlers, reading to them helps them to understand what books are and how to handle them; that they have pages, that the pages get turned, the pictures relate to the story. As your child grows one of the benefits of reading to them is that they hear words we don't often use in daily life. It's not every day you can walk down the street and point out a zebra or a camel crossing the road!

But the main point of all this reading to children is that it is great fun, a terrific bonding experience and also helps with a baby's learning to talk. The more words babies hear every day, the more words they will learn. The more words a child can say makes learning to read so much easier. And it only takes five or ten minutes a day.    

How you read to your child will depend on your child's age. The books you choose will differ too. This excellent book "Baby Read-Aloud Basics" gives really useful tips on the books to choose and how to read with your child at different ages to get the most fun and pleasure out of reading to your child.

Speech in children

Speech in Children

It is true that almost all children learn to speak eventually. Mainly speech in children develops simply by the child copying the parents, other family members and people the child meets on a daily basis. Some children learn to talk much earlier than others.  This can be because of differences in how the parents and adult caregivers talk to the child. 

Several research studies have found that the use of a special way of talking to babies called " parentese" or "motherese" or "child directed speech" helps babies to learn new words faster. "Parentese" appears to be a natural way for adults to talk to children; a kind of sing song, high pitched voice that concentrates on long drawn out vowel sounds. 

Sometimes this way of talking is referred to as "baby talk" but sometimes the term "baby talk" is also used for the way some adults talk to babies and toddlers using the immature words babies use when they are still learning how to speak correctly. The difficulty is that it isn't made clear which "baby talk" people refer to when they state whether it is useful or beneficial.

This way of talking to babies is found in countries around the world so it seems to be instinctive. From this it can be judged that "parentese" has been useful for the species as a way to develop speech in children. 

Researching speech in children is becoming easier with the development of hi-tech brain monitoring equipment which lets scientists monitor brian activity in very young babies. It has been shown now that babies prefer to listen to "baby talk". they prefer the higher pitched voice and focus on it in preference to normal adult speech patterns. So not only are parents hard-wired to use baby talk, babies and hard-wired to pay attention to it and that it is an important part of the development of speech in children.

Learn the best way to use baby talk when teaching babies to talk in the ebook Teach Baby to Talk