Fact #3:  Picking up reading in babyhood and toddlerhood is easy; learning to read at age 6 from formal instruction in school is hard work. Babies and toddlers can learn to read as easily and informally during a critical period of brain development from birth to age 4 as they can easily pick up fluency in two complicated languages, say Mandarin and English, during this same time.

 Fact #4:  ​A baby's brain will triple in size during the first year of life. Reading aloud and talking to your child feeds the child's brain 10 million words of raw data each year in the first three years of life, and enables their neuralpathways to develop in different ways. A multisensory flash-word technique, or labeling objects and reading-around-the-room, can start as early as 3 or 4 months of age, during the brain's height of plasticity and synaptic formation. Such activities flex your child's mental muscles by feeding word traces into his brain, impacting both brain growth and cognitive development.

 Fact #5:  Tacit knowledge of phonics rules are hallmarks of toddler readers. They can't deliberately articulate the rules of phonics, but 2- and 3-year-olds can intuit phonics and exhibit the ability to decode and read words they have never seen in print. They cannot learn to do this through the kind of formal instruction used in school. They likely use special right-brain learning capacities, and pick up phonics and word-pattern recognition just like they pick up multiple languages during this period. They lose these special brain capacities by age 6.

 Fact #6:  Reading and being read to enables 2- and 3-year-olds to use complicated sentences, manage memory of distant events, build general knowledge, access new information, and develop powers of reflection. Reading stimulates language and vocabulary development, which is highly correlated with measures of intelligence. A 5-year-old reader acquires new knowledge from reading, while a 5-year-old nonreader can only admire the pictures.