Make Any Time Rhyming Time

I recently ran into a mom who felt that nursery rhymes were too “old fashioned” for her child. That has motivated me to share a piece of information that has been in this blog before but clearly bears repeating for today’s audience.

Reading requires something called “phonemic awareness,” a component that is one of the more challenging prereading skills that young children must master. What is it? Quite simply, it’s the awareness that the words they hear people say—even single syllable words like “cat”—are actually made up of individual sounds that are quickly combined: “ka+ah+t”. Kids gradually catch on; however, researchers have discovered that there is an easy way to speed the process along: listening to nursery rhymes and other simple poems and songs. In one classic study, researchers in England found that the greater a child’s knowledge of nursery rhymes, the more phonemically aware the child was. Why? Because the fact that rhyming words share their final sound draws attention to the existence of individual sounds in words. And what make this finding even more significant is that the greater a child’s phonemic awareness, the better his subsequent reading skills.

The lesson is clear. To help your baby start reaping the benefits of rhyming from the moment she is born, sing her to sleep with lullabies. Include songs and games with lots of rhyming words in your daily interactions. Captivate her attention by emphasizing the rhyming word pairs. Keep his enthusiasm up by substituting family names into the rhymes (e.g, “Daddy and Julia when up the hill….”). Use pictures of several objects with rhyming names to make a homemade mobile to hang over her crib or picture to tape to the wall. And don’t forget that tongue twisters (like the ever popular “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…”) works in a similar way but focused on initial rather than ending sounds.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Making Letter Learning Fun

Today I’m taking a break from talking about baby sign language to provide a simple tip to support the earliest steps in learning to read. Here’s a fun, creative way to help your child begin to recognize the various curves and contours that distinguish the letters of the alphabet from one another. (By the way, this idea comes from my book, with Dr. Susan Goodwyn, called Baby Minds

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Simply start with an uppercase letter. Draw the letter, for example, an A, on a piece of paper, and say something like the following: “Here’s an A. What do you think we could make out of an A?” Be creative and transform the letter into a silly picture—perhaps of a clown as in the drawing included here. Draw it again and transform it into stick-figure person or house. Ask your child for other suggestions.

Begin with about three letters, and play the game for a couple of weeks with only these letters. You can compose many different drawings with each individual letter. Then begin to add a new letter to the familiar set. This is a great game to play while waiting in a restaurant for your food to be served because there will always be lots of napkins or place mats at your disposal.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis
and
Co-Founder, The Baby Signs® Program

How to Make the Most of Book-Reading

In last week’s blog, I talked about how signing spurs language development by increasing a baby’s enjoyment of books. Part of the explanation that I gave for this positive relationship between books and language development involved something researchers call “Dialogic Reading” Quite simply, this term means engaging your child in a conversation about what’s on the page rather than just reading the text and moving on. What I want to do today is provide some specific tips for how to get such conversations going.

• Instead of only asking for labels (like “What’s that?”), ask questions that require some thought to answer (“Where do you think Goldilocks is running to?”) In general, good openers include “Why….?” “How….?” “Where…?” You’ll find you naturally expand on whatever answer your child provides, thus providing more words for your baby to ponder—and learn (e.g., “Too big? Yes, Goldilocks was too big. She was just too heavy for that little bitty chair.”).

• Ask about things that are more abstract, like feelings or predictions about the future. “How do you think Goldilocks felt when…?” “What do you think Goldilocks told her mommy when she got home?” Parents really underestimate children’s ability to think about such things. What’s more, helping your child identify a character’s feelings will indirectly help her identify her own.

• Ask questions that relate the book’s events to your child’s own life. “Have you ever seen a bear?” “What would you do if you woke up and saw three bears?” Like the rest of the human race, babies are more interested in things that have direct relevance to their own lives.

• Relax, laugh a lot, and “go with the flow.” Don’t worry if your child gives the wrong answer—or no answer at all! The point is to make talking fun. A child who genuinely enjoys such give and take will be motivated to get better at participating. A child who doesn’t, who feels “interrogated” and put on the spot, will emotionally withdraw and see book-reading as aversive. In other words, “Dialogic Reading” is not—I repeat—is not an IQ test! It’s just a simple way to enrich the experience of cuddling up with Mom or Dad and a good book.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program

and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Lay a Foundation for Reading with the "Odd-One-Out" Game

While it’s true that more and more information is available these days in audio and video form, reading is still an immense part of how we all—including children—learn about the world around us. That’s why it’s important to help kids in any way we can to conquer this essential skill. As I’ve mentioned before in these tips, one important pre-reading skill that’s easy and fun to work on is “Phonemic Awareness.” What this fancy term refers to is the simple recognition that words are made up of separate sounds—for example, the word CAT is made up of the separate sounds “C + A+T. Because the job of letters is to represent these separate sounds, being able to recognize that words are divisible in this way is obviously an important component of learning to read.

In a previous tip I talked about how introducing children to rhyming words through nursery rhymes and poems is an easy way to help them develop this awareness. Here’s why. Words rhyme precisely because they share their ending sounds but not their beginning sounds and poems help make these words and their sound similarities and differences stand out so children are more likely to notice. For example, hearing the words HILL and MILL in close proximity draws attention to the fact that they begin differently but end the same.

Here’s a simple game you can play with your 3- to 5-year-old to take advantage of the power of rhyming to promote phonemic awareness. It’s a form of what we call an “odd-one-out” game in which you say three words, only two of which rhyme, and ask your child “Which one doesn’t belong.” For example, you might say “Cat, Hat, Dog” where the one that doesn’t belong is “Dog.” Or “Juice, Boat, Goat,” where the one that doesn’t belong is the first word, “Shoe.” After a while, your child may even be able to reverse roles and give you the list of words to decide the “odd-one-out.”

This is a great game to play anywhere--while riding in the car, standing in line at the grocery store, or waiting at a restaurant for your food to arrive. And each time you play it, you can enjoy the fact that you’re not only having fun, but also providing practice that will help your child develop the important pre-reading skill of phonemic awareness.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Just the Same Only Different!

One of the benefits of signing with babies is that it increases their interest in books (because it enables them to take a more active role in book-reading), an interest that helps pave the way to early literacy. But did you know that you can actually provide simple, fun activities starting even earlier that can help too? Here’s your tip for today from our book, Baby Minds.

One of the fundamental skills necessary for reading is the ability to quickly detect the differences between shapes. After all, that’s all that letters really are—shapes on a contrasting background. One way to lay the foundation for reading, then, is to expose your baby to shapes so that he can begin to differentiate curves and orientation. Here is an idea to help your baby begin to do just that.

I like to call this tip “Just the same, only different” –which sounds like a contradiction but really does fit. What you do is provide your baby with two pictures that are the same in most ways, but differ in one or two minor but perceivable ways. (The younger the baby, the more salient the differences should be.) Put them somewhere where your child is likely to look at them. For example, you might attach two identical pictures of a favorite character—Big Bird, perhaps-- to a wall by the crib, high chair, or changing table. Then make one different—maybe by adding a mustache and beard with a marker. In glancing at the pictures, your baby will, at first, just sense that they are not identical. This almost automatically leads to a search for the discrepancy—in other words, an urge to “compare and contrast” the two pictures. In this simple way you’ve given your baby something to think about—some “food for thought,” if you will—and in doing so you’re providing practice in recognizing subtle differences between similar shapes, thereby paving the way for letter recognition!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow "Baby Signs" on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

"Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers"

I'm sure all of you are aware of how reading books to babies from very early ages is important for fostering literacy(as Julie is doing here at two ages with my grandbabies, Olivia and Nate), but here's another useful tip.

I’m hoping some of you recognize the title of this post as a classic “Tongue Twister,” one among a set of old favorites that also includes “She sells sea shells by the sea shore” and “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” I’m betting, though, that few of you have given thought to how these tricky mouthfuls actually aid kids in learning to read.

Here’s how. The way a phrase qualifies as a tongue twister is by including a series of words that all emphasize the same sound, for example, the sound of the letter “B” in the case of the baby buggy phrase. The beauty of these fun phrases is that they “sneak in” lessons about what reading teachers call “phonemic awareness”—the simple recognition that words, although when heard may sound like a single sound, are actually made up of separate sounds. The example I used in an earlier blog post where I talked about rhyming was the word “cat” which is actually made up of the separate sounds “C+A+T. Because the job of letters is to represent these separate sounds, being able to recognize that words are divisible in this way is obviously an important component of learning to read.

It makes sense, then, that anything that increases a child’s attention to the sounds at the beginning or within words—like Tongue Twisters do--indirectly helps increase phonemic awareness and, therefore, helps lay an important foundation for reading.

So, “Turn your toddler’s tongue to tricky twisting” and before you know it, she’ll be a “really rapid reader reading written words!”

Happy Signing (and don't forget to follow us on Facebook),

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, The Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

How Rhyming Aids Reading

Here at Baby Signs, we know that there’s more to helping children prosper than just teaching them to sign. That’s why we developed a set of classes for children from Birth to age 6 called “On the Grow™” classes (check them out at www.babysigns.com). It was while I was working of the curriculum for the latest one of these where we teach parents and children the ASL signs for the alphabet (“ABC Sign with Me!) that it occurred to me that this blog might be a good place to share a few fun tips about helping children learn to read.

Preparation for learning to read can, and in fact should, start very early. One pre-reading skill that’s easy and fun to work on is “Phonemic Awareness.” What this fancy term refers to is the simple recognition that words are made up of separate sounds—for example, the word “cat” is made up of the separate sounds “Ca + Aa + Ta. Because the job of letters is to represent these separate sounds, being able to recognize that words are divisible in this way is obviously an important component of learning to read.

Well, an easy and fun way to help children develop phonemic awareness is to introduce them to lots of nursery rhymes and simple poems. Here’s why. Words rhyme precisely because they share their ending sounds but not their beginning sounds and poems help make these words and their sound similarities and differences stand out so children are more likely to notice. Listen to this old classic:

Humpty, Dumpty sat on the WALL
Humpty, Dumpty had a great FALL
All the king’s horses and all the kings MEN
Couldn’t put humpty together AGAIN.

Research from the University of Oxford in England actually found that 3-year-olds who knew lots of nursery rhymes were more advanced in phonemic awareness than those children who did not—and therefore were on the road to reading at an accelerated pace.

So dust off your copies of Mother Goose and give it a go. You’ll not only be having fun, but also helping your child develop a critical ingredient necessary for learning to read.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, PhD.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC