Teach Your Baby to Spell

Article Source: ezinearticles.com by Krista Guerrero

Let's face it; babies have some amazing brain development happening the first five years of life. The things they learn in those early years are nothing short of fantastic. They go from doing practically nothing to crawling, walking, and running, then babbling, saying a few words, and by two years old are usually speaking full sentences. It is almost as though they learn all these things on accident. However if we understand how babies learn, we can teach them much more on purpose.

I know of many babies that can read, and I know of others that can spell. It is not hard to give your baby some simple spelling lessons. If you use alphabet toys, such as blocks, magnetic letters or foam bathtub letters, this happens naturally.

By playing with letters and telling your baby what the words you form say, you are teaching your baby to read. You can simply teach your baby to spell by pointing to each letter and naming them when you form words. If you make alphabet play a part of your routine, your baby will easily be able to spell out their name and many other words in no time.

Children that are taught to sign as babies naturally learn spelling because there are words that are finger spelled. When we spell out many words, they can be spoken like a chant, making their spelling easy to remember. My children learned to spell their names and all the names of their family members from an early age. They heard this being done repeatedly and learned to spell many words with no effort.

There are little chants to help children spell words such as Mississippi and encyclopedia. These are fun to do with children of all ages. We can encourage our children to be great spellers by just making word play a fun part of our day. You can have magnetic letters and play around with names of family members on the refrigerator. You can progress from there to rhyming words and names of objects around the house.

Teaching babies to spell in this way is simple and fun to do.