Growing a Reader from Birth: Your Child's Path from Language to Literacy

An essential guide to understanding children's language from the first days of babbling through a five-year-old's mastery of reading. How children learn language is an endlessly fascinating subject, with new research revising our views every day. In Growing a Reader from Birth, seasoned researcher Diane McGuinness reviews the latest findings on just how much infants, toddlers, and preschoolers know and are capable of expressing from the early months on. Chapters covering each year of a child's language growth link this new knowledge to McGuinness's own innovative program for children's mastery of reading. She charts how a child first makes sense of the world of sound and symbols and then progresses from recognizing and decoding words to developing a vocabulary and using it to become a good listener, an expert reader, and an eloquent speaker. Growing a Reader from Birth not only illuminates the stages of language learning in children but also equips parents with indispensable advice on how to maximize their interactions with their children and be a positive force in nurturing their child's language from day one.