How to Grow a Young Child's Reading Brain

Introduction

Literacy is based on hearing and knowledge. In today's world, literacy can have a broader meaning than simply reading and writing. Literacy can include being good in math, having technology skills, and solving problems. High levels of literacy are needed to do well in school and in a job, and to have choices and flexibility in career success. The bottom line is that literacy is tied to knowledge. This includes knowledge of the words, sounds, and infrastructure of our language, as well as knowledge of what's going on in the world.

The Challenge - Preparing Children for the 21st Century

Our challenge is to prepare children to be flexible and nimble with many choices in this century. The job market now demands higher minimum verbal and math skills to work than it does even to start college. Children have to read well to do well because so much learning occurs through reading. In fact, the achievement gap in reading is created before the first day of kindergarten. The purpose of this talk is to discuss how we get that child's brain ready to develop pre-literacy skills so that the child does not start kindergarten already behind. There are things we can do to help children start kindergarten with a foundation and information necessary for them to understand what is on the written page. As we work with families and professionals, it is important to keep the big picture in mind, and that is, to connect the dots between hearing, brain plasticity, listening, talking, and literacy development.

A Design of Human Beings

Figure 1 shows a design of human beings and how learning occurs.

Figure 1. Design of human beings.

We start with hearing. From hearing spoken information, the child learns spoken language. Spoken language is the scaffolding for the secondary linguistic structures of reading and writing. A child learns the foundational skills of reading and writing through about third grade, and then from fourth grade on, reading and writing float the academic boat. That's how academic competencies are advanced, leading to professional flexibility from a knowledge and a literacy base. This allows independent function, choices and community contributions.

Hearing is a first order event for spoken language, reading, and learning because as human beings, we're neurologically programmed to extract patterns from speech sounds that we hear in order to process spoken language. This leads to reading, which forms the foundation for academic competencies. The auditory centers of the brain are critical to this whole process. We know that because of current basic science studies of neural imaging and also by observations of the child's real world performance. Think of hearing as the Velcro to which other skills, like attention, spoken language, reading, and academic competencies are attached. Children have to repeatedly hear details of phonemes. Phonemes are the individual sound structures of spoken language. We have to first hear the phonemes in order to understand the subtle aspects of language. The child is learning very subtle linguistic aspects in infancy. Hearing is the basis for all of these others skills to occur.

What is Hearing?

Hearing is defined as brain perception of auditory information; hearing occurs in the brain. The ears are the doorway to the brain. The ears are the organ of hearing, just as the eyes are the organs of seeing, the mouth is the organ of tasting, and the nose is the organ of smelling. These organs are masterfully designed to capture raw environmental data as they are the receptacles of environmental information. That information is then transformed to neuroelectric and chemoelectric impulses that the brain can receive and process. For example, the ear doesn't know what a vibration means. The ear captures vibratory data from the environment, but does not know what it means. The brain knows that that vibration, for example, is the mother talking and saying, "bye bye baby" - that meaning is learned in the brain. The nose doesn't know that the olfactory molecule it captured is a chocolate chip cookie - the brain learns that it is. Hearing occurs in the brain, as does smelling and seeing and tasting. Therefore, we define hearing as brain perception of auditory information.

Hearing is the first order event for language, spoken communication, literacy, and social-emotional connections. Whenever we use the word "hearing," think "auditory brain development" using a billion neurons and a quadrillion synaptic connections. Acoustic accessibility is the ear's ability to receive intelligible spoken language vibrations and send those to the brain, which is essential for brain growth. We have eyelids that close out visual optic rays, but humans have no ear lids to close out auditory vibrations. Therefore, the brain is available for auditory information 24/7. A key to the brain receiving intelligible, high fidelity, clear, auditory signals including spoken language is a concept called Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Signal-to-Noise ratio refers to how loud a signal (like spoken language) is in relation to other noise. Speech must be louder than background sounds in order for the brain to receive high fidelity, clear, intelligible speech. Everyone hears and learns better in quiet, or when the desired signal is louder (not too loud, but louder) than competing stimuli. 

In summary, our sense organs are portals for environmental information that lead to the brain, where knowledge of the meaning of that information occurs. The ear is the doorway to the brain for sound including spoken language. Hearing occurs in the brain. Spoken language information serves as the basis for reading. 

What is Language?

We say reading is language. Language is an organized system of communication used to share information. Spoken language consists of sounds, words, and grammar that express what is in our minds. Language also includes facial expressions, gestures, and body movements.

It's All About the Brain 

Hearing is not about ears; hearing is about the brain and about cognition. What we know is based on the information that reaches the brain. Hearing loss is a blockage in the doorway. If there's a small blockage in the doorway, we call that hard of hearing. If there's more of a blockage, we call it hard of hearing. If there's a complete blockage in that ear doorway, we call it deaf. Deafness means that no auditory information will get to the auditory centers in the brain, unless we use technology. The purpose of technology like hearing aids or cochlear implants is to break through that ear doorway and deliver auditory information to the brain. When a child has a doorway problem, if they're hard of hearing, they wear hearing aids. If they're deaf, meaning the doorway is essentially closed, we use a cochlear implant to breach the doorway. Because none of those devices are perfect replicas of the organic doorway, we need to enrich that brain, through that doorway device of hearing aids or cochlear implants, to grow their auditory brain with knowledge and that enrichment of the brain includes pre-literacy skills. Reading aloud, we'll talk about that. It's important to actively teach literacy to grow that brain through the doorway for knowledge of spoken language and reading and we need to grow that brain whether or not there's a doorway problem.

When Does Literacy Development Start?

There are many researchers, including Janet Werker, Roberta Golinkoff and others, who study early infant language development and early literacy development. Their general conclusions are that infants acquire their native languages by listening and they start life being prepared to speak. What goes into the brain is what comes out of the child's mouth. For example, if a child is speaking Spanish, what went in through their ear doorways to develop the brain, was Spanish. If English is coming out of the child, English went in. If clear speech is coming out, clear speech went in. If garbled speech is coming out, garbled speech went in. If the children you're working with do not have clear speech, we must always first check their input auditory doorway. What auditory information is getting to the brain that's compromising their spoken language output? If their spoken language output is garbled and compromised, their reading will be also. Reading is built upon spoken language, which is built upon auditory brain exposure to auditory information.

The inner ear has been fully developed for 20 weeks before birth. At birth, infants prefer their mother's speech, songs and stories heard before birth because for 20 weeks in utero that fetus' auditory brain has been stimulated with auditory information. That's how critical auditory activation and exposure is to brain health and brain development. Think about it. A premature baby is often born before their brain has had the requisite, organic enrichment and stimulation of their auditory pathways. A premature newborn needs a lot of enrichment to make up for what was missed in utero to activate their auditory brain centers. In the first six months of life, well what that means is because of hearing in utero and their mother's voice, that newborn on day one can recognize their mother's voice and prefer their mother's speech and information, their father's speech, stories that they heard in utero, that's recognizable day one. And in the first six months of life, babies can discriminate many speech sounds and vowels, consonants and even some words, but after that first year of hearing one or two languages, that baby's brain becomes a more efficient analyzer. So the first six months, the baby is kind of a universal auditory language receiver, but by the second six months of life, that baby's brain becomes much more efficient and tuned in to the language that it hears over and over and over because it's repetition that grows and cements neural connections throughout the brain.

Think about what that means. It means that organically, if you want your baby to know several spoken languages, we should start introducing the brain and enriching the brain in those languages in the first six months of life, when that brain is going to be completely receptive to every single speech sound that might be available and then we give that brain practice, practice, practice, practice with the meaningful interaction using the languages that are relevant to that child's environment. Infants use their phonetic, that is speech sound categories, as a basis for learning and analyzing new words and listening experience in infancy is absolutely critical for language development. Actually, that child's brain, although also holistically learning words, is analyzing phonetic categories, to phonological processes, lexical-semantic use leading to reading and higher order language use. Those first months of life are critical for laying the architectural foundation for talking, reading, learning.

Reading is probably the most complex task humans perform because it uses so much of the brain. Speech is biologically programmed using specific parts. Children will naturally learn to speak, provided we activate their brain with meaningful, interactive, spoken communication, beginning on day one. However, reading is not natural. There are not preordained neurological areas for reading like there are for talking. For reading, we have to create the neural connections. We have to have explicit instruction in the code because while humans are hardwired to talk, we are not hard wired to read. We have to create the wiring. We have to create the neurological connections between the prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, primarily in the left hemisphere. That connection has to be created through practice and intention. As such, reading is an exercise in neural plasticity.

Literacy retrains and rewires all aspects of language in that we have to connect the areas of the brain that deal with semantics and orthography, the written part of reading, so multimodal integration and a good reader never bypasses phonology. That is the sound structure of language. Skilled readers can read fast. They can sound out words in approximately 150 to 200 milliseconds. A poor reader who doesn't have their brain programmed for reading finds reading to be slow, labored, and error-prone. It can take up to 2,000 milliseconds to code a single word. How do you get better at reading? You get better at reading by reading; through practice, practice, and more practice. Good readers get better because they enjoy reading and they practice reading. Poor readers don't typically get better because reading is so laborious and they make a lot of mistakes, so they don't practice. By the time they code the second word of a sentence, they've forgotten what the first word is because they've exceeded short term memory capacity, so therefore they do not practice.

Listening is the Foundation for Reading 

Stanislas Dehaene is a French cognitive scientist who studies reading and the brain. He discusses that it takes approximately 20,000 hours of listening to speech - spoken language communication - before the child's brain has clear mental referents for each of the speech sounds. It helps to actively teach those references by talking. Talking in meaningfully interactive ways develops the neural centers for reading. The ability to listen to 20,000 hours is necessary to enjoy rhyming and to develop phonological awareness skills. Reading, as we discussed in the design of human beings, is parasitic on listening; reading stems from spoken language. Spoken language comes from hearing. It's all based on listening. Listening can be thought of as applying meaning to sound. Listening allows the brain to organize, establish vocabulary, and develop receptive and expressive language. Listening is where hearing meets the brain.

Why Read Aloud?

Reading aloud is an important critical listening task. If we can recommend only one thing to our families that really sticks, it is to read aloud to their babies, beginning in infancy. I recommend 10 to 20 baby books a day. I don't actually know if 10 is better than five or if 30 is much better than 20 - we just know that reading aloud as a part of a spoken interactive conversation with our babies is a critical component in those 20,000 hours of listening.

Why read aloud to babies and young children? It's important to read aloud because exposure to storybooks is the biggest factor in a preschooler's vocabulary. In fact, reading a physical book tends to evoke more conversation than an electronic book. It doesn't mean that electronic books are bad, but when you have an actual book, you have more conversations about it. With a concrete item like a book, there are fronts and backs to explore, pages to turn, textures to feel, and scents to smell. Having a physical book gives you more to say. More parent conversations occur during read-alouds than during any other activity.

Children who receive read-alouds show gains of more than twice as many new words. Reading aloud to children before age six years of age affects language, literacy and reading. Think about reading as a conversation - we're talking about the book and we're talking about what's happening. I encourage us not to look at reading as a task to be checked off, but as an enjoyable, playful conversation that grows a child's brain for learning. The goal is to be reading chapter books to a child by the time they're four years old. This goal applies to all children, even those who have a doorway problem, hearing loss, and use technology to breach the doorway to get information to the brain. By chapter books, I don't mean to read a 4-year-old War and Peace.  I mean reading books that have continuity of chapters and fewer pictures.  This will extend the child's auditory attention, their auditory memory, their auditory predictability, their auditory sequential skills, their memory for new words and their expansion of concepts. You can really never read to a child too much, as reading can be integrated into every activity.

Name the Characters in the Books

Read books that have the characters named in order to help a child better auditorily remember the book, and to have it be more meaningful.  For infants, finding books that name different characters tends to lead to higher quality shared book reading and results in more learning and brain development.  It's possible that books that include named characters actually prompt more talking by the parent. We might start reading picture books to babies that have no words in them at all. In that case, create names for the characters. It causes more retention and more meaning for the child.

Overall, only about 20% of parents read to their children daily. For preschoolers, that number is higher. In both poverty and university level families, fathers don't spend much time reading. They tend to read only 15% of the time, while mothers read the rest. I recommend that we encourage the men in children's lives to read to them as well. As role models, men need to read to their children too, and because reading is a conversation. Men often choose different books to read, talk about the characters differently and make different noises to express meaning within the storyline. I recommend that both the men and women in children's lives participate in reading activities with them.

Tips for Reading Aloud

It's never too early to begin reading to your child, and it's never too late to start, although it is best to start in infancy. Continue to read after the child learns to read alone. A big mistake that parents often make is to stop reading to their child once the child can read aloud on their own. However, the child reads to us as they're learning at their level, and we read aloud to them at two or three grade levels above what they can read on their own. Why do we do that? Because we're stretching their auditory memory. We're growing their knowledge of words and concepts. It is very important to read aloud every day, several times a day. Have books near the high chair, books near the changing table, books in the backseat of the car. Books in the playroom. Books in the bathroom.

Establish a regular time to read or times to read. Show enthusiasm. I advise parents if the books bore you, it's going to be hard to be eager and excited when we read the books to the child. Read different genres. Read nonfiction, fiction, poems, news stories, comic books. You don't know what the child will like. Choose a different genre. If the child is losing attention, cut the session short and pick it up again later. We want reading to be enjoyable, not something that anyone has to endure. Link the story to life and to other books. As the child gets older, ask them to predict the outcome, based on the pictures that they see in the book, based on what they're hearing in the story. Ask questions like, "What do you think will happen now? I wonder what Johnny's going to do next? What would you do next?" Have the child think, problem solve, reason.

Start with picture books, and advance to story books and novels. By age four, we're reading all different kinds of chapter books. We can have a picture book and a story book and a comic book and a poem. We can have some books that we read over and over because the child loves them. Reading loved books repeatedly builds auditory memory and enjoyment, as well as predictability. However, we do want to introduce new books as well to add new language and new information. We have different genres. We have new books for new knowledge, new information, new excitement.

One activity you can do is to go on a book walk prior to reading the book. When you have a physical book in your hand, you can point things out, asking questions like, "What's the title? Who's the author? Who wrote this? Who's the illustrator? What's on the front of the book? What does that tell us? What's on the back? What is the illustration or picture on the cover? How does that illustration give us a clue as to what the story might be about?"

Watch this video from Brigham and Women's Hospital about their neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) reading program.

Notice from the video that we always encourage families to use their home language, their family language. Why? Because that's the language where you have the most to say. It's the family's job to teach their child their language by talking with them, interacting with them, and reading to them.  We recommend that families read in the language that they know the most so that they can have conversations about what they're reading as well. If the language of the family is not the language of the community, very early on we need to have a platform for adding the language of the community.  One way we can do that is by having someone who is a natural or native speaker in the community language read aloud to the child.  For example, the family may read aloud books in Spanish and have conversations in Spanish, and then interventionists or friends may read aloud to the child in English and have conversations in English. This is a great way to build listening skills in the languages that will be important for the child. Also, it's logical to think that these are little premature babies who don't understand a thing that's being said.  However, the brain does not know the meaning of those words yet, but those words are being fed to the brain. You know what else is happening? Did you see how those babies in the video were being cuddled as they were hearing and seeing the books to whatever level they're able to at that point in their development? Reading is associated with being safe and lovingly cuddled. That is a win-win all the way around.

Five Areas Need to be Addressed to Develop and Enhance Literacy 

Research has identified five areas that need to be addressed to develop and enhance literacy:

1. Phonemic/phonological awareness
2. Phonics (decoding)
3. Reading fluency (automaticity in recognizing words)
4. Vocabulary (word meaning)
5. Comprehension

Phonemic or phonological awareness mostly comes from listening. Phonics is decoding what you hear based on what you see in the written word. Reading fluency is automaticity in reading aloud and in recognizing words. Of course, for literacy you have to know the meaning of words, which is vocabulary. You can't read something if you don't know the words. Comprehension, the meaning of what's being read, does not occur on the page - it occurs in the brain. Comprehension comes from background knowledge, prediction, imagery, asking questions, comparing and contrasting, and metacognitive awareness.

When a child has dyslexia or reading problems, it is not a single issue. Dyslexia or reading problems is not one thing. There are a whole range of nuances and degrees of challenges with reading. Take the sentence, "The driver of the tanker truck received a citation for illegally transporting inflammable materials across state lines." Consider a fifth grader reading that sentence. The child ultimately might be able to decode the words; it might take a long time. He may get to the end of the sentence and say, "I have no idea what that sentence says." Several things are happening; his brain was not prepared early on for that level of reading in one sentence. He could decode, but very slowly, but also he didn't know all the words. He might know "driver", and "tanker truck".  He might not know what "citation" means, or the meaning of the word "ticket" in this context.  He may or may not know "illegal" or "transporting".  Does he understand what "across state lines" means?  He might think it refers to the white lines or yellow lines on roads. It isn't that this child is incapable of knowing those words and understanding the concepts; maybe he just hadn't learned them. How can you possibly understand what you're reading if you don't have word and conceptual knowledge?

Teach Sounds Early!

We start building word and conceptual knowledge very early. The key for phonological awareness is that we have to teach sounds. Phonological awareness is the insight that words are made up of individual sounds, also called phonemes. This skill refers to the ability to segment and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. It is not the same as phonics, which involves knowing how written letters relate to spoken sounds.

Activities that develop phonological awareness in children provide practice with rhyming and beginning sounds and syllables. Phonological awareness is auditory; it involves listening. While phonological awareness isn't really a curriculum, there is a curriculum for actively teaching these speech sounds. Research has shown that a child's awareness of the sounds of spoken words is a strong predictor of that child's later success in learning to read. You have to know the parts of the words. This link between phonological awareness and literacy development is extremely relevant. Early interventionists must evaluate phonological awareness skills in children and provide enriched, early intervention to support its development.

Early intervention to enrich phonological development is important for all children and especially, for children who have any sort of doorway challenge, any sort of hearing loss. That would include ear infections, fluid in their ears. Children who have sensorineural hearing loss and wear hearing aids or cochlear implants are certainly capable of distinguishing phonological elements, but we have to enrich and practice listening to those elements. Using mother-ese, or parent-ese, is the way we naturally speak to babies. For example, we don't say, "Here's your bottle." We say, "Oh, Johnny, here's your bottle. Are you thirsty? Oh, mommy's little baby is hungry." That's very important to speak that way. In fact, I'll talk more about mother-ese during the music presentation. The key is to teach the sound first.

Excellent interventions are available to boost literacy. It is critical to intervene early, in order to develop the child's brain during its optimal state of natural neural plasticity. If a child has spoken language problems from any cause (e.g., doorway problems, ear infections, attention issues, other developmental issues), and if those problems are resolved through practice and intervention, by the time the child is about 5 1/2, they have a good chance for literacy development to proceed smoothly. However, this is where we have to bring in our speech language pathologists early, because if that child's spoken language and phonological problems are not solved early, literacy problems can be anticipated.

Classroom intervention studies show that simple remediation strategies are shockingly effective. A few extra hours of weekly phonics instruction and preschool and Pre-K and kindergarten, rhyming in first grade, can bring up to 92% of struggling readers to have them be in line with their peers. In other words, as a matter of course, we need to enrich for everyone. If we notice that a child has any spoken language difficulties, any auditory doorway problems, any lagging issues, we have to intervene early. Don't wait and hope it works out by itself. Do not have a wait-and-see approach, because we've got to get that brain set up for reading.

We also know that reading impairment, any sort of dyslexic or reading challenge, tends to have a strong genetic component. Up to 50% of children with a familial risk of dyslexia will eventually have some sort of reading problem. It is important, early interventionists, to find out if there's a family history because what that means is we really need to be intentional and very, very rigorous and strategic about enriching that brain auditorily, early.

How to Teach Sounds

The term phonological awareness doesn't just describe one skill. It encompasses a whole list of important skills. Here are some different parts of phonemic awareness that we need to enrich and teach early. 

Sound Word Discrimination.

• Tells whether words or sounds are the same or different. For example: Cat/cat = same; cat/car = different.
• Identifies which word is different. For example: Which word is different: sun, fun, sun = fun is different
• Tells the difference between single phonemes. Which sound is different: /s/ /s/ /k/

Blending.

• Orally blends onset-rimes: What word is this? m-ilk
• Orally blends syllables: What word is this? mon-key
• Orally blends 2 or 3 phonemes into one word: What word am I trying to say? /m/ /o/ /p/?

Segmentation.

• Initial sound isolation: What is the first sound in mop?
• Final sound isolation: What is the last sound in mop?

Rhyming.

• Identifying rhyming words: Do “cat” and “mat” rhyme?
• Produces a rhyming word: Tell me what word rhymes with nose?

How to Teach Phonological Awareness

The best way to teach phonological awareness to young children is through fun books, games, songs, in addition to a wide variety of hands-on activities. Teachers and parents can encourage play with spoken language as part of their overall literacy program. Nursery rhymes, songs, poems, read-alouds that manipulate sounds are all effective methods to develop the different aspects of phonemic phonological awareness.

There are many good books that are used to facilitate phonological awareness, including (but not limited to) the following:

• "Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?" by Nancy White Carlstrom
• "Silly Sally" by Audrey Wood
• "Is Your Mamma a Llama?" by Deborah Guarino
• "Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?" by Bill Martin, Jr.
• "Time for Bed" by Mem Fox
• "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin, Jr.
• "Sheep in a Jeep" by Nancy E. Shaw
• "In the Tall, Tall Grass" by Denise Fleming
• "Miss Mary Mack" by Mary Ann Hoberman and Nadine Bernard Westcott
• "Good Night Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown

If you use an internet search engine and type in "early literacy activities" or "phonologic activities" or "books for phonological awareness", you will find many more ideas online.

What Else Can We Do to Facilitate Reading?

Talk constantly with the child about what the child is thinking, as well as about what the child is doing. Have conversations, which means everyone gets a turn to talk. Create experiences and talk about them. Use complex language. Don't use simple language. We often persist in using single words or simple language, but that doesn't build auditory knowledge. We need to use grammatically correct sentences and phrases. State concepts differently. Don't use the same words all the time. Read aloud with the child on a daily basis, using books that are at least slightly beyond where the child is linguistically. This will stretch the child's auditory attention, their linguistic knowledge, and their auditory memory.

Use synonyms and antonyms and point them out (compare and contrast). Show curiosity. Ask questions and show the child how to find answers. For example, "I wonder how things work? I wonder what just happened here?" Use causal explanatory conversation. Children don't know how the world works. Let's tell them about it. Show them. Play games. Tell jokes. Jokes are an amazing way to learn about spoken language, and there are even joke apps to help facilitate your joke telling. Sing, dance and play musical instruments. Don't forget the language of mathematics. Rob Madell has written books about developing the language of mathematics for preschoolers. How do we talk about addition, subtraction, addition, multiplication? There is language to be learned there. 

Build the child's auditory feedback loop. Children need to listen to themselves. As the child is learning to read aloud to us, have them focus on how they sound. For example, "Johnny, your voice sounded so amazing when you made the voice of that mouse. Did you hear how you sounded? Listen to yourself as you read that book." That's called building their auditory feedback loop. In school, as children are developing their writing, often a teacher will say to a child, "Johnny, read aloud what you just wrote on your paper about your vacation. As you're reading what you wrote aloud, how does that sound to you?" Children need to listen to themselves to monitor how they sound and to facilitate their reading. One of the tips I use for children who have doorway problems (i.e., those who use hearing aids or implants to get auditory information to the brain) is to have them speak into their remote FM microphone as they read aloud. Also, as I read aloud to them, I speak into the microphone, because I want that child's brain to pay very close attention to how the reader sounds and how they sound. 

Another idea is to make experience books. This can be done electronically (on a tablet or computer), or on traditional paper. Beginning when the child is an infant, draw one page or take a picture every day of one thing that happened. It could be a stick figure with a sentence below it. You could use a real photograph. You are creating a personal book or journal for this child. I have worked with children who have closets full of these experience book journals that were initially written by their parents and then by them. Use it to have conversations about the child and their experiences.

Resources

As I stated earlier, you will find many resources simply by searching online. One particularly good resource is the imagination library (https://imaginationlibrary.com). It is from Dolly Parton's foundation. It's a book gifting program that mails free, high quality books to children from birth until they begin school, no matter their family's income. It's a wonderful way to get books and to remind people to read, read, read.

The next few resources are focused on children who have doorway problems and for whom we need to enrich and practice phonologic awareness and knowledge as a basis for literacy.

• Advanced Bionics is a company that makes cochlear implants. They have resources available called "Tools for Schools" that are helpful for all children, even if children have typically develping hearing and do not use their technology. 
• The Listening Room (https://thelisteningroom.com/). Tools for Toddlers and Tools for Schools provide support and resources to grow with your child. Help your child get a head start. 
• Supporting Success for Children with Hearing Loss (http://successforkidswithhearingloss.com/) is a wonderful website for all children. It focuses on children with hearing loss, with an emphasis on to how to enrich their auditory brain development, their listening and their literacy pre-curriculum and ongoing curriculum.
• HearingFirst.org is also focused on babies who have doorway problems and their families, but their ideas are excellent for everybody.

Thank you all for participating in the presentation. I wish you all happy reading in developing each child's listening brain as the basis for acquiring knowledge, allowing each child access to the rest of the world. 

References

Cole, E., & Flexer, C. (2016). Children with hearing loss: Developing listening and talking, birth to six, 3rd ed. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

Dehaene S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The science and evolution of a human invention. New York: Penguin.

One World Literacy Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.oneworldliteracyfoundation.org/index.php/why-support-owl/iliteracy-statisctics.html

Robertson, L. (2014). Literacy and deafness: Listening and spoken language. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

Lonigan, C., Wagner, R., Torgeson, J., & Rashotte, C. (2007). Test of preschool early literacy (TOPEL). Greenville, SC: Super Duper Publications.