There is no better way to invest in your children than to read with them. Reading is free and needs very little equipment, but it equips your child for life. Reading together builds language fluency, language control, vocabulary, and even social-emotional health. Snuggled with your little one and a book is an opportunity to bond and give your complete attention to your emerging bilingual.  But reading together necessitates far more than just reading the words off the page. Instead, the most successful shared reading experiences are interactive. It's called dialogic reading , and it is a method developed by the Stony Brook Reading and Language Project. So often we read books and children listen. This is completely-adult driven. The way to deepen your reading experience involves an adult and child (or children) having a dialogue around the text they are reading. This can happen as soon as your little ones begin to produce language, and shouldn't stop when they're no longer &q

At age 1, most children says their first words; at age 2, most children speak in two-word phrases; and by age 3, most children speak in full sentences. All the words Mateo could say at one were yes, no, gracias, dos, hola, hello, bye bye, "do do," nene, pavo, manzana, banana, arándanos, and he could make the most common animal sounds. But at two, his vocabulary and sentence structure started to explode!  When Maya was two, she was still in the single-word and simple phrases stage. I worried about her language development, because I saw her monolingual peers conversing. We didn't spend much time with other bilinguals then, so I didn't have anyone else to compare her too.  Maya and Mateo are classified as simultaneous bilinguals, which means they have been exposed to two or more languages since birth. These children incorporate all the languages they are exposed to into their oral language, and they go through the same stages of development as monolinguals. But the diff