I know this is true because I taught my son to read as an infant.  Today he is 5 years old.  He is your average 5 year old boy.  He loves to play and have a great time, but he also loves to read.  He especially digs animals, scientific facts and history.  He loves to learn about different animals and then share the facts he has learned with me.  Lately I feel like he knows more about these subjects than I do.  This is because he has a real interest in them and spends time reading and making notes each day.  This is not something I tell him do.  He enjoys writing some of the main facts that he has learned in a notebook.  I find it all quite humorous.

Yesterday he went on a trip with his dad.  I was recalling his first time traveling with me at 20 months old.  When he was a baby I made him all sorts of vocabulary books.  I would cut out all different pictures from magazines and make word books for him.  We would read the words and look at the pictures.  One of our books had a picture of an escalator in it.  At the time we were living on a small island in Belize so he had never seen an escalator before, except in a picture.  While we were making our way through the airport we had the opportunity to ride on an escalator.  He was so excited to see a real escalator and ride on it.  He completely understood what it was.  He had seen the word, read the word and seen a picture of this object.  Now he got to touch it and ride it.  It is in this way that we are strengthening the brain connections being formed during our children's early years.  It is so much fun to see when a young child or a baby "gets it".  I have had this experience many times with my children throughout the years.  It is so much fun to teach tiny children.  They get so excited to learn new things and to recognize objects.  It is my opinion that there is not a better student on earth than a tiny child.

You can see some of the books I created for my kids here.