Nurturing the Love to Learn10.0102Learn­ing to read early won’t make every baby a genius. But that's not the point.

While teach­ing a child to read dur­ing the first six years of life DOES pro­duce a highly-capable child with a poten­tial for genius, this shouldn't be the pri­mary objective we teach our kids to read from a young age.

What we teach chil­dren to love and desire, will always out­weigh what we make them learn.

~Jim Tre­lease, early edu­ca­tion author

So, it’s not just about teach­ing a child how to read; but to instill in a child the desire to want to read. And when a child wants to read, they then become capa­ble of edu­cat­ing themselves.

Nobody can deny that read­ing is the heart of edu­ca­tion. The knowl­edge of almost every sub­ject in school flows from read­ing. A nation that doesn’t read much, doesn’t know much.

This very sim­ple act has been known to:

• build lis­ten­ing com­pre­hen­sion, which feeds read­ing comprehension
• pro­vide pos­i­tive read­ing role models
• stim­u­late lis­ten­ers imagination
• intro­duce a child to mean­ing­ful literature
• enlarge vocab­u­lary and atten­tion span

Teach­ing a baby to read early may not be a recipe for genius, but they will grow up to be the child that has a more exten­sive vocab­u­lary, and will be famil­iar with sounds, words and books. Most impor­tantly, the child comes to school more ready and eager; sim­ply brim­ming with desire to learn.