Brain Development
and Literacy

Whether you are raising a bilingual, multilingual or monolingual child, it is important that your child receive the kind of stimulation that will encourage language development. Start Today! Find ways to incorporate these tips, suggestions and ideas into your baby’s life every day!

Did You Know?
“Children develop much of their capacity for learning in the first three years of life, when their brains grow to 90 percent of their eventual adult weight,” L.A. Karoly et al. Investing in Our Children. RAND, 1998. “To encourage the healthy development of a newborn, parents need to know that it is the earliest interactions with themselves and other caregivers that most affect the way a baby’s brain becomes wired for later learning.”

Basic findings about human brain development:

• Although genes control the initial unfolding of the brain, neural activity begins well before birth as axons make their first connections.
• At birth a baby’s brain contains 100 billion neurons or virtually all the nerve cells it will ever have.
• A trillion glial cells, named after the Greek word for glue, form a kind of honeycomb that protects and nourishes the neurons.
• Shortly after birth a baby’s brain produces trillions more connections between neurons than it can possibly use.
• By the age of two a child’s brain contains twice as many connections and consumes twice as much energy as the brain of a normal adult.
• The brain’s greatest growth spurt draws to a close around the age of 10.
• The brain eliminates the connections that are seldom or never used, preserving those that have been transformed by experience.

Tips for parents to stimulate brain development:

1. To enhance problem solving, play contingency games with babies like Peek-a-boo.
2. To enhance recall memory, videotape outings and show them to your toddler and ask questions about what happened.
3. To enhance language development, provide toys for your toddler which lend themselves to pretend play and take an active role yourself.
4. To enhance reading, sing songs and play games with rhymes beginning at birth.
5. To enhance math, make numbers a feature in any activity that involves repetition. For example repeat a word like tickle, tickle several times with the action, then change the action and your descriptive words to sets of three.
6. To enhance drawing, have you toddler tell you about his pictures. Point to various parts and ask questions.
7. To enhance writing, label your children’s pictures. When he scribbles ask what he is writing.
8. To enhance her sense of humor, be on the lookout for opportunities to do inappropriate things with familiar objects like trying to put your toddler’s shoe on your own foot.

Books/Media:

Baby Minds
Brain building games your baby will love by Linda Acredole and
Susan Gerodwyn, Bantam, 2000. ISBN 0-553-38030-3

Your Child, Birth to Three.
Special 2000 Edition, Newsweek. Fall/Winter, 2000.

Web Sites:

Making Connections: How Children Learn.
A summary of recent brain research.
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ReadWithMe/makconn.html

Brain Development
http://www.lili.org/read/readtome/braindevelopment.htm

-----------------

Information on this page reprinted with permission from the Urbana Free Library website:
www.prairienet.org/buildingblocks/index.shtml

back to Multilingual Living Magazine Table Of Contents