The best books for parents and teachers from research on how infants and toddlers develop literacy

At Gianni Rodare Scuola for 3-month to 3-year-olds, I watched 2 to 3-year-olds draw, a year-long project described in the book The Little Ones of Silent Movies by Loris Malaguzzi and Tiziana Filippini: The authors explain:

“Children are born with “insuppressible, vital, eager urges to build conversational friendships... Words that come later are not a sudden event born from nothing but emerge from a submerged silent laboratory of attempts, trials, and experiments in communication using tools children constantly improve through long preparation. The results—words and drawings—show the strong desire to communicate and interact, basic traits of children.”

I love this book because its text explains and drawings show the roots of language. It inspired me to observe babies more closely and introduce paints and markers.

1961: My life’s thrill was Danny’s birth—happy, loving, and by age 2, articulate speech that turned heads. But in Montessori school, despite numerous materials for writing and reading, he was called “hand retarded.” He struggled, only acquiring reading in high school. Today he is a clinical psychologist with honors galore! 1961: We knew little. 1971: First brain scan. 1977: Cognitive science was born as scientists from numerous fields began brain studies. In Danny’s youth, there were guesses and alleged treatments but little science.

Cognitive-Behavioral Neurologist/Kennedy Krieger Institute, Developmental Neuropsychologist and Professor Emeritus/Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Martha Bridge Denckla’s book, Understanding Learning and Related Disabilities: Inconvenient Brains, gives a scientific understanding of ADD, ADHD, ASD, and six other brain dysfunctions to parents, teachers, and others suspecting learning problems.

Wow! Dr. Denkla is so deeply knowledgeable. Her scholarship and explanations of conditions provide information to relieve readers' anxieties.

Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, explains how children master language: “Pidgin,” a “rough jargon,” results when persons speaking different languages must communicate to accomplish work. Pidgin is transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop by a group, exposed at the age children acquire their mother tongue.” Amazingly, we watch complex language created “from scratch.”

The brain’s inherent wiring drives language acquisition. “Humans are so innately hardwired for language, they can no more suppress learning and using language than suppress the instinct to remove a hand from a hot surface.”* Sequencing language from birth, Pinker concludes: “Three-year-olds are grammatical geniuses—master most constructions, usually obey rules, respect universals, err in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoid many kinds of errors altogether.”

*Quoted: S. Dehane, p.64. Thank you Steven Pinker for the “bible” on what language is! I can find everything I need in Pinker's comprehensive work.

Cognitive Neuroscientist and Developmental Psycholinguistic Maryanne Wolf’s trilogy is foundational to understanding how the brain reads, how to teach reading, and the impact that learning to read has on reorganizing the brain. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Wolf lucidly explains: Because the brain has no “reading center,” each child must create literacy by adapting brain functions that evolved for other purposes. Wolf explains so lucidly what a reading brain is! Bravo! A real tour de force!

Kornei Chukovsky, leading Russian children’s poet, in his book From Two to Five, describes children’s “whimsical, elusive thinking—original, picturesque, amusing speech.” "Children two to five are earth’s most inquisitive creatures with questions evoked by the mind’s tireless need to comprehend its surroundings.” I know of no other author who so brilliantly captures children’s own words. I read this book over and over for inspiration.