Guru Logo
Grade Level Guru

What does literacy look like for a baby and toddler? Is chewing on the corner of a bath book really early literacy? 

In short, yes.  

A child might not utter their first words until they turn one, but their listening brains are preparing to speak months before they actually speak.  And, listening, speaking, and reading, in that order, are all connected.

Reading to babies is much more about connection and exposure to books than actually learning to read or even paying attention to a story.  

By the end of this article, you will know what the earliest reading foundations look like for ages 0-3 years and why those foundations are important.

Let’s get into it:

If reading to babies is not about teaching them to read, what is it about? 

1. Vocabulary Development: Use Your Words.

An extremely common refrain you hear from parents and teachers with young children is, “Use your words.” When a baby begins to talk, to share its needs, the bigger vocabulary the baby has to express those needs, the better he or she will be able to do so.  

By age 3, a child should have at least 1,000 words in their receptive vocabulary, and by kindergarten that number grows to between 5,000 and 10,000.  Receptive vocabulary only grows with high quality meaningful language exposure, which is best accomplished through reading.

Receptive vocabulary are words that you comprehend in speech and reading.  Working vocabulary, words you produce, speak and write, lags far behind receptive vocabulary.

Reading to babies begins to build their receptive vocabulary. Linguistic research indicates that babies and toddlers require 10-40 meaningful exposures to a word before that word is integrated into their receptive vocabulary.  

When comparing the vocabulary exposure of a child who has been read to, to the exposure of a child that has not been read to, the gap in language exposure can be as much as a million words by the time the child enters kindergarten.  This is the infamous Million Word Gap that has been heavily researched.  This is the difference between a 5 year old kindergartener with a receptive vocabulary of merely 5,000 words compared to 10,000 words.

2: Relationship Building and Structure

Building book time with babies and toddlers into your daily routine fosters bonding and provides structure and predictability.  Snuggling and hearing a family member’s voice is comforting and soothing for a baby.  Overall, reading time is predictable, structured, secure, safe, and fosters bonding. 

Reading to children ages 0-2 is not so much about teaching them to read, although book and language exposure makes learning to read a lot easier, it is about enjoying books together and fostering a positive experience and environment where books and reading are a pleasant part of everyday life. 

3. Long Term Payoffs

There are many long term valuable payoffs related to reading to children ages 0-2 closely related to learning to read.  A baby who has been read to will enjoy a larger receptive and working vocabulary, will have an easier time comprehending grammar, an easier time learning to read, and statistically, moms who read to their children tend to have to parent less harshly as their child grows.

What do reading foundations look like as a baby grows to a toddler?

0-6 Months

A baby might mouth, chew, or just hold a cloth book, a thickboard book, or a tear or waterproof book from 0-6 months.  When a family reads to a baby, a baby does not really need to ‘pay attention’ to a book, the positive bonding time and hearing the voice of a loved one is where the value is for this age.  However, when a baby bats a book away, book time is over.  We don’t want to build any aversion to book time, just positive, comforting, shared time with a loved one’s comforting voice and a book.  

Just because a baby isn’t paying undivided attention to a book or learning to read does not mean that book time is not a very powerful opportunity for baby’s language development and bonding time with loved ones.

6-9 Months

The chewing and mouthing of books will continue.  We all know that babies explore and discover the world with their mouths, and books are no exception, but a baby 6-9 months will begin looking at the pages more.  

Books with objects, but not yet stories, are ideal at this age.  Books with objects allow families to ask ‘ where’ questions that a baby can answer by pointing as their receptive vocabulary begins to grow.  For example, a parent asks, “Where is the cow?” and baby answers by pointing to the cow on the page.

9-18 Months

The next level in baby books involves very simple stories and babies will have favorite pictures.  The baby’s receptive vocabulary will grow with high quality language input from baby books.  Books with rhymes, alliteration, and repetition will foster phonemic awareness as the baby’s brain learns the individual sounds of the language they will eventually speak and read.  As far as questions, where questions are still appropriate.

12-24 Months

Baby books with simple stories continue to be developmentally appropriate at this stage.  Toddlers are ready to answer more sophisticated questions like, “What does the cow say?”  They will be ready to have the ‘job’ of turning the pages.  Toddlers might ‘read’ books, meaning the look like they are reading a book, but just babbling, saying words, or basically ‘playing’ at reading a book.  Lastly, if you are reading to your toddler and they walk away mid-story, just keep reading.  Odds are, they are still listening and paying attention, they just need to move!

18-36 Months

At this stage our toddler is ready for longer stories with engaging plots. Stories with humor, silliness, alliteration, rhyming, and repetition are the bread and butter for this age.  Also, children at these ages can begin exploring non-fiction topics like weather animals, jobs, and construction equipment.  Children are ready for a broader range of questions: who, what, when, where, and why questions to encourage expanded answers (not one word) and working vocabulary.  

Responding to these questions is a perfect opportunity for vocabulary expansion and expanding responses.  For example, if in the story Hungry Hungry Caterpillar you can teach the word cocoon or ask how the caterpillar must feel after eating all those things.  When your toddler replies that the caterpillar’s tummy hurts you can expand their answer and vocabulary saying, “You are right, he probably has a stomach ache because he ate too much food!”  Thus modeling more vocabulary and a more complex sentence structure.

Ages 3-4

By ages 3-4 children should be ready to take the small but sophisticated leap into more open-ended questions, taking their first steps into the realm of reading comprehension.  Questions like, How do you think the character feels? What do you think will happen next? Or relating events in the story to things the child has experienced.  As a loved one engages in these reading discussions with children, they should always look for opportunities to expand children’s answers with more complex sentence structure and vocabulary, as with the above Hungry Hungry Caterpillar example.

In Kindergarten, reading comprehension will expand into character development, plot events, conflict, analyzing language and word choice, integrating information from illustrations, lessons learned by characters, and more.

Conclusion

The biggest thing to remember is that this all starts with holding a book, pointing, babbling, imitating reading, rereading the same book 100 times — it all counts. 

Reading for babies and toddlers should not feel or look like learning, even though an incredible amount of learning is happening.  Reading with babies and toddlers must be zero stakes, there is no ‘failure,’ just relationship bonding time with family.  It should look like snuggles, comfort, a daily routine, and a time to be together doing a shared activity.

Resources:

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Grade Level Guru

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading