PRESCHOOL: BIRTH TO THREE
The best early teaching you can give your child is to immerse her in language from birth.
Turn off the television; half an hour of Mr. Rogers per day is plenty for any child under five. Talk, talk, talk – adult talk, not baby talk. Talk to children while you’re walking in the park, while you’re riding in the car, while you’re fixing dinner. Tell them what you’re doing, while you’re doing it (“Now I’m going to send a fax. I put the paper in face-down and punch in the telephone number of the fax machine I’m calling…and then the paper starts to feed through like this.” “I spilled flour on the floor. I’m going to get out the vacuum cleaner and plug it in. I think I’ll use this brush-- it’s the furniture brush, but the flour’s down in the cracks, so it should work better than the floor brush”). This sort of constant chattering lays a verbal foundation in your child’s mind. She’s learning that words are used to plan, to think, to explain; she’s figuring out how the English language organizes words into phrases, clauses, and complete sentences. We have found that children from silent families (“We never really talk much during the day” one mother told us) struggle to read.Read, read, read. Start reading chunky books to your baby in his crib.
Give her sturdy books that he can look at alone. (A torn book or two is a small price to pay for literacy). Read picture books, pointing at the words with your finger. Read the same books over and over; repetition builds literacy (even as it slowly drives you insane). Read longer books without pictures while they sit on your lap or wallow on the floor or cut and paste and color. Read books onto tapes, along with their comments, so that they can listen to you read over and over again. Get an infant-proof tape recorder so that babies can listen to you reading, singing, talking, and telling stories and poems while they play in their cribs.
After you read to your toddler, ask her questions about the story. Why did the little gingerbread man run away from the little old woman? Why did all the dogs want to go to the top of the tree in Go, Dog, Go? Why did Bananas Gorilla take all the bananas?
As soon as children begin to talk (which will be early if they’re immersed in language like this), teach them the alphabet. Sing the alphabet song whenever you change a diaper (often). Stencil alphabet letters, both capital letters and lowercase letters, to the wall, or put up a chart. Read alphabet rhymes and alphabet books.
When they know the names of the letters, tell them that every letter has a sound, just like animals – pigs say oink, dogs say woof, and b says b, b, b as in baby. Start with the sounds of the consonants in the alphabet (that’s everything except a, e, i, o, and u). Tell them that b is the sound at the beginning of bat, ball, and Ben; say “T, t, tickle,” and “m, m, mommy” and “c, c, cat.”
Then tell them that the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are named A, E, I, O, and U. Sing “Old McDonald had a farm, AEIOU.” Then, teach them that each vowel says a sound, just like an animal – a as in at, e as in egg, i as in igloo, o as in octopus, and u as in umbrella. These are the short sounds of the vowels, and the only vowel sounds you should teach at first. All of this is prereading.
Prereading preparations works. Susan was reading on a fifth grade level in kindergarten. Her son Christopher was checking out fourth and fifth-grade books halfway through his first year of school at home. We’ve seen these results duplicated by other home-schoolers. If you create a language-rich home, limit TV and videos, and then teach systematic phonics, you will produce readers.
(From the book "The Well Trained Mind By Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer)
Above info is beneficial for both, homeschoolers and schoolers.
So how much do you speak and read to your children?
And for parents of older children, at what age your child started reading?
