Must read: Growing a Reader From Birth

Growing a Reader from Birth: Your Child's Path from Language to Literacy

This book really made me think about my interactions with babies and toddlers.  It is so, so well-written; I typically type up great quotes from the books I read, and this one had so many jewels of information I ended up with five single-spaced pages!

You can preview this book over at Amazon (follow the link, above.)  Here are some quotes that still stick out to me:

"You should also be aware that infants and young children understand a lot more than they can express.  In technical jargon, language perception precedes language production.  Not only do babies understand a lot more than you might imagine, they are also mentally working out some of the finer implications . . . Language comprehension is not just about what words mean.  It is about every mental process that helps us interpret the world.  It's about knowledge, about understanding time, sequence, and causality, about empathy, logic, and inference." (p. 18)

"As your toddler gets older, games get more intricate, more and more fanciful, and sillier.  The toddler's sense of humor, I'm afraid, is just about as silly as it gets.  Your main line of defense is to join in.  You can find out some interesting things this way." (p. 79)

"It turns out that the reason children like hearing a story over and over is precisely because they can't remember it.  A young child's story memory is in the twilight zone between total amnesia and vague recollection.  The repetition is actually quite stimulating, because the story sounds vaguely familiar each time they hear it, yet they continue to be surprised by what happens next.  Nothing captures our interest more than something familiar yet surprising or not quite known.  This is why music lovers can listen to the same symphony or the same opera over and over again." (p. 102, 103)

"It is not only beneficial for parents to enlarge on what children notice or talk about, but also to make connections between things present and things past.  Making analogies is one of the important aspects of the highly effective communication style, 'symbolic emphasis.'" (p. 185)