If your baby spends any time at a daycare or with other caregivers, here's a great way to boost their literacy while giving them strong connections to family: a photo book!
Start by collecting pictures of people who are most important to your baby, including parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, pets, and close family friends. You can also include pictures of the places your baby knows best: their crib where they sleep, the table where they eat breakfast. If most of your photos are on your smartphone, you can go to most local drugstores to print them. Write captions and put them on labels for each picture.
Then ask your caregivers to keep the photo book in a particular place and read at the same time every day! Perhaps right before nap time, or right before they go home. You can explain how important it is to include reading as a daily habit to your child's growing brain.
Those plastic photo books you can find at a dollar store work fine, but if you have time (though let's be honest - if you have a baby, free time is limited!) you can find lots of scrapbooks and materials to do a fancier job.
For a larger understanding of why daily reading to babies is a great practice, as well as some more tips on how to do so, a great resource is So Much More Than the ABCs by Judith Schickerdanz.
- Laura Raphael, Children's Services Coordinator