My grandchildren from South Africa have been staying with us over Christmas. My granddaughter, at two and a half, is at that magical stage where she soaks up new words and she talks and sings non-stop, partly to herself, partly for others. In her case, as for many African children, she is bilingual. At home in South Africa, she also speaks an African language called Pedi. But I have to stick to English.
I recite lots of nursery rhymes. She loves to shout them out. 'I like coffee, I like tea, I like sitting on my granny's KNEE'. Her favourite book is a nursery rhyme book, strangely illustrated in black and white by the artist Paula Rego. The rhymes themselves are nonsensical, and don't bear close examination, but she is fascinated. The nursery rhyme she likes best is 'Goosey Goosey Gander' and she gleefully chants the ending with me 'There I met an old man who would not say his prayers so I took him by the left leg and threw him down the STAIRS'.
I have also been reading for myself a book titled Becoming Literate in the City: The Baltimore Early Childhood Project by R Serpell, L Baker, S Sonnenschein (Cambridge University Press). This documents how 50 children from the inner city age three to eight learned to read and write. It charts their activities at home and at school and how they dovetail.
Learning to read is hard for many children, and only a minority of these children become fluent readers by age eight. The authors suggest that one of the best predictors of children's success is whether or not reading and learning about words is fun. For pre-school children, enjoying literary activities, sharing rhymes, joking about sounds and making a game of words is correlated with later success in reading. By contrast, being made to learn your letters, being read to and then having to answer questions about the story - or any dutiful or didactic approach - can put young children off.
Of course, the situation is much more complicated than this, and children still have to learn about the correspondence between phonemes or sounds and letters if they are to read. But at home, and while children are young, the trick is to fool around. My granddaughter is on the right track!
Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London