Beyond Baby Talk: From Sounds to Sentences, A Parent's Complete Guide to Language Development Book

The first eight years of a person's life are critical to their language and literacy development.  Authors Kenn Apel and Julie Masterson offer advice on how we can aid in that development in their book, "Beyond Baby Talk: From Speaking to Spelling: A Guide to Language and Literacy Development for Parents and Caregivers." It also provides background into why specific strategies are successful and what parents should not worry them. Grandpa Dave found it very interesting.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

- Kindergarten children tell stories with actual plots.

- Rhyming is an important building block for reading.

- Children who can divide words into individual sounds tend to be better readers and spellers.

- Many parents talk differently to girls versus boys.

- Younger children actually learn valuable language skills when they are around their older siblings.

- During the first few years of life, differences between boys and girls may be apparent when their word meanings are examined. For example, research has shown that girls are more likely to begin using emotional words like love like sad, and happy before boys. Obviously, boys are not considered to be delayed in their use of these words, and ultimately they do use them; however, there may be a time delay between when girls begin using these words and boys first say them.

- Mothers of two-year-olds tend to ask more open-ended questions of their daughters, use more child-directed speech, and produce longer and more complex sentences is than they do with their sons. They also just talk more to girls than they do to boys. When mothers are talking to their two-year-old sons, they use language more to direct their sons than they do with their daughters. They also may be less articulate than when they are with their daughters.