Apple Magazine - Fall 2011

Kids stuff
Setting up your child
for success in life

Smith, the assistant executive director of the Muttart Foundation, which just published a discussion paper on early childhood education.

“Children in families where someone will just sit and spend time with them are exposed to language, and they have a much greater facility in terms of hearing sounds and putting sounds together to make words, and then putting words together to make sentences,” he says.

Books and reading also foster
conversation, ignite the imagination,
pave the way for more formal learning
and build “pre-literacy.”
Pre-literacy is crucial for success in
school. “When kids don’t have that
foundation for literacy they’re starting
way behind the eight ball when they start
the formal process of acquiring reading,”
Bateman says.

Reading to your children from infancy on will not only get them comfortable with words and symbols and help them understand they have meaning, Smith says, but it will also help develop the

Feed baby; check. Burp baby; check. Change her diaper. Read one of her books to her. Experts say it’s never too early to start reading to your infant. In fact, books and reading are an investment that will pay off when your child gets to school.

“Learning to read doesn’t start in
grade one, it starts at birth,” says Dariel
Bateman of Calgary Reads, a literacy
group that helps struggling readers in
grades one and two. “Up until six or
eight months, you could be reading a
newspaper, or a magazine or Virginia
Woolf or whatever you want,” says
Bateman. “Reading, talking, chanting,
singing, cooing; it’s all how kids begin to
develop the notion of sound, and that the
sound means something.”
When babies get a little older, around
nine months, you can trade in the
newspaper for a soft baby book and settle
in, snuggle up and spend time reading
to your child. “It’s really foundational
in terms of children accessing and
learning language,” says Christopher
emotional and cognitive skills they need
to focus in the classroom.

No one expects your kids to be reading when they start kindergarten (or earlier), but being versed in pre-literacy means they will likely know their letters and might be able to write their name on their first day of school, skills that will help guarantee their success in the school days to follow.