It's important to start reading to your baby from as early as 6 months old, which acts as a good preparation for being able to learn to read once he or she arrives at school age.
In order to develop a strong set of language skills in your baby, you should try and incorporate the following ideas and activities into your baby's daily life.
Make reading a normal activity in your home If your baby sees that you, as an adult, read on a regular basis, then they'll see that it is an extremely normal and grownup pastime.
As your child uses you as a role model that they want to mimic, they'll be motivated to want to join in with this adult activity.
Make sure that your baby sees you reading a book, newspaper or magazine in front of them.
If you want to hold your baby's attention, then you could consider reading whatever you have in your hand out loud to them.
Create a baby bookshelf Build a baby bookshelf at ground level, so that your baby is able to crawl up to the shelf and select a book to read at will.
It's incredibly important to let your baby know that he or she is able to make choices and this is also a way of encouraging them to be part of this reading malarkey that they see their parents doing.
Make reading as fun as possible In order to let your baby associate reading with having a positive experience, make it as fun for him or her as possible.
Don't use a monotonous tone of voice, which just tells that your baby that reading is boring.
Instead, make sure that your child can see your face.
Use as many expressions as possible, make your voice sound interesting and laugh at funny parts of the story.
Incorporate variety into your reading Show your baby that reading and words in our language come in many different styles and subject forms.
Don't limit your reading to bedtime stories.
Make sure that you introduce words in songs, rhymes, poems, short stories, fairy tales and any other ways you come up with to show off our rich, complex language.
Words aren't only found in books As adults, we read wherever we go.
If we're walking down the street we read shop and road signs.
When we're in the supermarket we read food labels.
As we stroll through the park, we might read a sign towards a playground or toilets.
Try and get into the habit of reading these words aloud to your baby and point to the signs as you say them, so that your baby is able to understand that there is a link between the written and spoken word.
Make reading come to life Your baby books will no doubt come with lots of pretty pictures.
Show them the correlation between the pictures in the story that they like reading and the real life version.
This doesn't really work with unicorns, but if you are, for instance, reading about farm animals, take your baby to a farm or to a field and show them the animals that they've enjoyed reading about.
Language development outside the area of reading As we all know, the spoken word is as important as the written word and this is equally as true when it comes to language development.
Make sure that you speak to your child all the time.
Repeat words over and over again to your child so that they become familiar with both the sound of the word as well as it's meaning.
Do this throughout the day and watch with pride and amazement as your baby absorbs all this new information and vocabulary.
There are dozens of ways that you can incorporate reading into your baby's daily life.
Try and go with the 'little and often' rule for the best results.