Your Baby Can Read If You Help

Your baby can do a lot of different things with your help, and beginning to read and understand language and vocabulary is at the top of the list.

While children typically begin to learn about letters and words and eventually begin to read once they enter school, your baby can get a jumpstart on these important skills by working closely with you at home. Spending time each day, or even just each week, reading aloud to him or her can help build recognition and comprehension and also breed familiarity with spoken language.

When beginning to work with your child and discover what your baby can do in terms of understanding words and language, there are some key areas of focus that are helpful to center your efforts and activities around. These areas help build babies’ basic knowledge and allow them to pick up more as they progress.

These efforts start with encouraging your child to enjoy books and want to read. If he or she starts to enjoy the activity with you and takes a genuine interest in you reading aloud, he or she will be more encouraged to try and understand the material. Story time should not feel or sound like a school exercise, and should instead take the form of a fun and enjoyable activity that you both can enjoy.

From there, helping your child determine how to work with a book may sound basic, but at a young age it can be very complicated. Work slowly and consistently to show how you follow words from left to right, use pictures to help illustrate what is going on in the story and how you eventually turn the page to find out what happens next. Children that don’t know how books work won’t be able to follow along and take anything out of the activity.

Basic comprehension and understanding of what you’ve been reading is also important, as it shows that your child is listening to you and processing the information you are sharing from the book. This shows both an interest in the book as well as basic skills involved in determining what to take out of it and how to do it.

Your baby can develop quickly once he or she begins to recognize certain words and identify particular objects by sight. Building familiarity in any form can only help develop a routine of understanding that helps children of all ages build on their knowledge base and learn to further comprehend what they are reading.

By focusing on these and other basic approaches, your baby can grow mentally before school is even an option. However it is important not to push things too fast too quickly, as you should remember that developing brains can only handle so much at a time.