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Why We Matter

There is overwhelming evidence that reading, singing, and gesturing with young children daily brings exceptional, permanent benefits.

And the research is clear: this is one area where earlier is better.

More than 80% of a child’s brain is formed during their first three years. What they experience in this critical window can permanently affect how their brain develops.

It can be hard for parents to know how to best support their child’s development – and actually putting theory into practice can feel daunting and unnatural.

That is where we come in. We show parents on the spot how to engage with their babies in evidence based ways to support cognitive development.

This is one area where earlier is better.

More than 80% of a child’s brain is formed during their first three years. What they experience in this critical window can irreversibly affect how their brain develops.

By reading, singing and gesturing with children, parents are teaching their children.

  • cognitive skills – like focused attention,
  • phonological awareness – identifying sounds in words, blending sounds, and recognizing rhymes and alliteration, and
  • visual memory.

Language development also helps children regulate their emotions, and of course, emotional regulation is the key to learning, and to developing social skills.

The Birth of a Podcast

In the depths of the pandemic, Pamela and Maya asked each other one question:

How can we help parents engage their babies and toddlers in ways that will support language development and emotional regulation?

Their answer to that question was: a podcast to bring interactive storyplays to parents and their babies, where they are.

To get into their living rooms and onto their changing tables and give them tips on how to persistently offer babies and toddlers invitations to connect around singing, gesturing, talking, and reading.

Because we know from research that babies and toddlers don’t learn language through video or audio alone.

Baby Wordplay Podcast has since been downloaded over a million times and continues to grow.

What the Research Says

We help parents use a combination of playful, evidence based practices to support and enrich their children:

  • SINGING.

    Research indicates that singing intended for children provides babies and toddlers with rhythmic and phonemic information that helps them learn language and later, helps them develop early literacy skills. We teach families songs – including nursery rhymes, Jamaican folk songs, and Spanish songs – to incorporate into their daily routines.

  • GESTURING

    to establish joint attention. Research shows that using gestures to establish joint attention (so pointing to say “Look! There’s the moon”, rather than to issue a command, like, “Look. Put on your shoes”) improves childrens’ vocabulary later on. We show parents how to incorporate pointing, waving and other gestures into read-alouds.

  • FINGERPLAYS.

    Neuroscience research shows that finger discrimination (a child’s awareness of each of their fingers – their thumb as distinct from their index finger, middle finger and so on) is closely correlated with later math achievement.

  • READING ALOUD.

    There is overwhelming evidence that high quality book sharing practices benefit children’s speech and vocabulary, attention regulation and other cognitive skills, and their social-emotional development. We provide rich, culturally relevant, and developmentally appropriate book recommendations, including bilingual titles and titles aimed at fostering a love of maths.