I have many fond memories of reading to my daughter when she was little. "Read it?" was one of the things she would ask many, many times a day. I loved children's books, so it was a chance to revisit all my favorites as well as find new ones. As a parent, I knew it was good to read to her so she would eventually learn to read herself and express her thoughts in words, but I had no idea of the learning processes that were going on in her young brain. From Reader, Come Home : "When you read to your children, you are exposing them to multiple representations - of the sounds or phonemes in spoken words, of the visual forms of letters and letter patterns in written words, of the meanings of oral and written words, and so on across every circuit component. The young brain is setting down re-presentations of this information every time the child hears, sees, touches, smells books" (pg. 131) "It is the stuff of conceptual and linguistic development (even tho...