Education

Link: http://www.education.com/reference/article/strategies-language-learning/

Along with talking and reading to the kids during the day, I gave my children a cassette player (without attached microphone) and read-along books when they turned a year of age. They had a bedtime of 9pm, but had to be in bed at 8:30. I read to them for 10 to 15 minutes then they were allowed to play with the tape player, book and their toys/stuffed animals, as long as they kept their head on their pillow, lights out at 9:00 pm. Many times they would play the book's tape and act like 'they were the one' were reading the book to their stuffed animals. Now days instead of cassettes, I would have the books on cds and my child would have a remote (taped battery door) to control the cd while they held the book.

No matter how you do it, the following quote is part of a longer article that shows how talking and reading to your child can be supportive.

Links: Wikipedia, Disney and the for the following quotes from education.com

From: "Strategies to Encourage Language Learning, Strategies to Support Language Development and Learning
by D. S. Wittmer|S.H. Petersen
Source: Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall
Topics: Speech and Language Development "
The whole article at the site is 4 pages long, this is just an exert.
"Researchers have found astounding differences in how much parents talk with their children. Some infants and toddlers hear an average of 600 words an hour while others hear as many as 2100 words an hour. Some children hear 100 different words an hour while others hear 500 different words an hour. These differences in the amount of language that children heard made a difference in their language development. By age 3 the children with talkative parents were talking more and with a richer vocabulary. They were averaging three times as many statements per hour and twice as many words per hour than the children of quieter parents. “The more time that parents spent talking with their child from day to day, the more rapidly the child’s vocabulary was likely to be growing and the higher the child’s score on an IQ test was likely to be at age 3” (Hart & Risley, p. 3)."
thier reference
" Excerpt from Infant and Toddler Development and Responsive Program Planning A Relationship-Based Approach, by D. S. Wittmer & S.H. Petersen, 2006 edition, p. 183-187, 189.

© 2006, Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved."