Baby Geniuses

Finally! The main course showed up! The previous chapters, although intriguing, were really technical and super-wordy. I have found a bit challenging to keep the whimsical tone in the blog, and not to go all APA-research style on y'all. This book has forced me to read the hard stuff and contextualize it all. Maybe the name of this blog entry should have been "Heather Contextualizes It All". I really have felt like I have been standing in a room of filing cabinets, attempting to find the correct spot in my brain for all the information. Something a   little like my picture above.

I have even felt like I am looking up from the floor from time to time. However, through the struggle, I am reminded that it is all apart of the bigger picture of being a learner. This is what we ask our students to do in our classrooms on a regular basis. Read it and make meaning. We ask them to do it for seven hours straight. Still apart of the struggle.

I want to talk about the following TED talk for just a moment.
Patricia Kuhl: The Iinguistic genius of babies 

In this TED talk, she speaks specifically to the what happens to the American babies when exposed to different languages in the first 12 months of life. She challenges what really happens in the brain during the first months of life. I bring this TED talk up due the real connections in this chapter. When the brain begins to pick up new language, the brain activates. In Patricia Kuhl's study, she intertwined two languages and focused on babies from 0-6 months. She and her team wanted to know the impact of different languages on the brain in their earliest development.

Tying this is to Proust and the Squid, it was proven that as early as an infant can sit on a caregiver's lap, a child can associate reading to being loved. Because both events occur, before a baby's first birthday, it is important to also note that by talking to our children, neuronal pathways are taking shape while we don't realize it. The language development is obviously a lifelong experience. Specifically, it is found the first five years of life are the most important. In ages 2-5 years of age, kids will learn between two to four words a day. Sweet neurons on fire!

Look at them go!

In chapter four, Wolf identifies five forms of development: phonological, semantic, syntactic, morphological and pragmatic. During phonological development, children are dissecting the sounds. C=/k/, A=/a/, T=/t/. They are also listening, distinguishing, piecing, and learning to maneuver the words- all at the same time. Semantic development focuses on increasing their vocabulary; they understand the meaning of the words and moves their vocabulary forward. Syntactic development is specific to the grammatical relationship of words, influencing the word order in sentences and its impact of the overall meaning. Morphological development is the child's acquisition of the smallest units of meaning. It is the "s" making words plural or the "ed" making words past tense. Lastly, pragmatic development enhances the social and cultural rules of words. It provides students the understanding on how words can be used in countless number of situations.

In the next blog, I am going to spend some time pulling apart several different points continuing in Chapter 4, "The Beginnings of Reading Development, or Not. These include: serious wordplay, laughter, tears, and friends, and what the language of books teaches us all. 

See you there.