Children love to be read to and the first building block of future reading ability is learning to understand and speak language. Babies learn phonemic awareness (the ability to perceive individual sounds in the stream of speech) in the first eight to ten months. By eighteen months, they may already understand an average of fifty words. After age two babies acquire vocabulary at an awesome rate (about 8 to 10 words a day). By age six a child understands about 13,000 words.
How do babies learn vocabulary? They learn from hearing a flood of words from their parents through positive conversations and a daily variety of read-alouds. Jim Trelease, the read-aloud guru states so simply, "if the child has never heard the word, the child will never say the word; and if you have neither heard it nor said it, it's pretty tough to read it and to write it." So read and talk and read to your child to help provide that all important foundation for learning. Some good books to start with are:
1. Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? By Eric Carle
2. Goodnight Moon By Margaret Wise Brown
3. The Very Hungry Caterpillar By Eric Carle
4. Pat the Bunny By Dorothy Kunhardt
5. Peek a Who By Nina Laden
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