Little Stories | Early Speech & Language Development

Did you catch my guest post over at Beautiful Books for Children? Rivka asked me to write about how to maximize a child’s language experience during reading books. Here’s what I had to say…

You want to know how to help your child get the most LANGUAGE out of books? Well, this is a topic I could talk about for days and I actually have a workshop available on this exact topic. But in this post I’m going to focus on telling you one thing, one big secret that the experts like to keep to themselves. Teachers, speech-language pathologists, and many others know that great storytelling for learning is no accident. It’s not difficult or time consuming, BUT it takes just the right attitude. All the great educators know that great storytelling is a performance.

Some of those, not-in-the-know, encourage parents to read long, boring stories to increase a child’s “listening skills”. Those in-the-know understand if you are trying to encourage a child to learn and enjoy books, you want to encourage engaged listening over passive listening. An engaged listener is able to truly participate in the story because the information is presented at a level that is understandable and in a way that moves her to actually experience something. Once a child has experienced stories in an engaged way, she BECOMES a good listener. She learns that stories are for her and that she should tune in, as to not miss any of the excitement.

Now that the secret is out, here are three easy steps that YOU, as mom or dad, can follow to help you get ready for your performance. Click over to the guest post to read the three steps...